Membership Change

[Lunarea]

Some of you lurkers out there may have noticed that you no longer have access to everything on the forums (blogs, for instance). This isn't a bug on the forums or a horrible mistake. The staff is currently discussing and implementing a tiered membership system. We are hoping that this system will promote more activity and encourage lurkers to post and participate in discussions.

For now, you only need to make 1 post to move from "Newbie" to "Lurker", and only 5 posts to move to the "Active Member" tier. We will discuss and change this number to something more appropriate.

What does this tiered membership mean for the community?
It's not a popularity contest. We want you to contribute because you feel like it and not to increase post count. But we are also a very close community and writing that first post might be a little too intimidating for some. We can't force anyone to post, but hopefully content will be enough incentive for you to come out of hiding. There will also be some perks to being an active member, but those will be unveiled in the official post of all the changes we've made.

If you have thoughts or feedback on the topic, now's the time to speak up! We haven't finalized the details and would love to hear your ideas.

[supershigi]

I think this is a great step forward. This system seems to have been incredibly effective at some other forums I've been a part of.

[Kojo]

While I don't like the idea of privatizing the forums too much, I do like the idea of encouraging non-active members to become active.

Just strike a balance so we don't become some holier-than-thou country club. That's not what we're here for.

[supershigi]

Yeah I think the idea is just to prevent people from:

1.) Lurking and never participating because they can access everything just by registering.
2.) Preventing people from signing up just to grab resources, in the case that we want to make more resources available.
3.) Signing up just to pimp their game threads and then never participating in the community.

[Lunarea]

There are lots of areas that are viewable to guests, and it will remain so. Everyone will still be encouraged to make as much public content as possible. But we also want to entice people into participating by offering them more. More content, more perks, more recognition and so on.

We are definitely not going to head into "you can only see cool stuff if we think you're cool" territory. We're just coming up with ways to increase our activity without changing the feeling of community altogether.

[HawkZombie]

This is a really dangerous line to tread. As long as you guys are fully aware of the pros and cons, then it's your call. Personally, I don't think it'll be a good idea, but that's just me.

[Sailerius]

I think it's a good idea for the most part, but I feel that if someone is just coming here to mine resources, then all this system will do is encourage them to make token hollow posts in order to get access to them.

[Lunarea]

@HawkZombie:
In terms of current activity, it shouldn't affect anyone. We might see a few random posts here and there, but I'll gladly take the spam (and cleaning up spam) if there's a chance that it will make someone a part of the community. If it blows up in our faces, well, hey, at least we tried, right?

@Sailerius:
Before the change, all people had to do access things like resources is register on the forums. I don't know that there is a system that will discourage people from doing that while at the same time allowing us to be open and attractive to newcomers. Yea, we'll get people making hollow posts to increase their post count, but too much of it is considered spam - and that has consequences such as having privileges taken away.

[Kojo]

@Sal I really don't think we're an RM community, there's no place to "mine resources" if you want something kept private, don't distribute. I do agree this may increase hollow, useless posts.

I agree with Sketch that this is a dangerous line to tread, and we've got to do it carefully to avoid becoming an elitist group.

I think that this may send the wrong message to newer people that we're a closed clique of individuals who just think the other is creative because we're friends. Not what I want. I am here to get real critiques and feedback from a fun, supportive community. Whatever changes we make should be made to better that single thing, not just make certain things needlessly exclusive.

However, I trust the admin, and I know they'll work hard on bettering the community.

[Lunarea]

This is why we implemented a small change before overhauling the whole system, Kojo. I mean, we've set the post count to 1. Just one post with 10 characters is all it takes. "Hi I'm XXX" does it. Posting something in one of the many silly forum games does it. And, like with this thread, we intend to inform everyone of what kinds of access there are and what perks they can get. Out of some 400+ members we currently have, 236 have made 0 posts. That's more than half of our database. And it's not that we've been secretive about anything. Anyone that has registered has had full access to our forum and all public blogs.

When I say limitations in content, I don't mean being so private that we become some elite group. Not being able to see blog content until you make 1 post isn't that unreasonable. Being an active member should give perks - and that's it, just perks. It's not like we intend to make the whole forum entirely private so only those who post a ton can see it. That's not what we're about. We just want people to start participating and getting to see some cool content in addition to all they see. Maybe they'll get a cool badge, or maybe a private gallery. We haven't decided yet, so your ideas are welcome.