I remember that thread! That thread was fuckin wild. 

I still say VGChartz needs some slimming down

1. I think we have to many forums for our site activity. Get rid of console based forums and just have gaming where we use "Tags" to categorize threads. This will make us look/feel more active.

2. I think we should allow for more antagonism. It's time to admit we overdid it in banning to many prolific users.

3. In general, more participation as whole from the active users.

Nah, strongly disagree here, there's no point in having more activity if that activity is toxic and driven by trolling, that just kills engagement in the long run cos people get sick of discussion being poisoned and participate less.

Not to mention that this site has been moderated as suggested by Xxain for at least a couple of years by now. It's not helping, it's not working.

We banned a bunch of the trolls like Kerotan, QuickRick, etc. Got told we were being too ban-happy and killing the site, lately I would say that our moderation in the gaming forums has been far more relaxed, that wasn't in response to any criticism Tbh. I think it's just a case of the site dying and we're all low-energy, even the StaffChat in Discord is dead, it feels futile when you have an absent owner and progressively outdated site.

But anyway, I do believe there has been less active moderation in gaming discussion, the focus has been more politics, but speaking for myself, even when I'm arguing with an obvious dickhead in politics, I tend to let it carry on longer than I perhaps should, because I don't like banning people who are in direct debates with myself, Lol. We got rid of the bigots and politics tends to get heated anyway so there tends to be more relaxed moderation there too. I know I'm a Mod so this won't mean much but I firmly believe anyway that of all the potential issues with the declining activity of the site, moderation is way down the bottom as a possible cause.

I don't regret and stand by the vast majority of permabans that the Mod team I've been under have made. We tried to clean up the forums for better discussion even if it's smaller discussion, toxic activity is shit activity, like Curl says, it kills engagement in the long-term even if it may provide a boost in the short term, quite frankly if the choice was for the site to die or it to be full with trolls just to save the site, then it would be better if the site just died. Activity for the sake of activity, no matter the form it is in, sounds awful to me.

It's not really the Mod teams core responsibility to keep the site alive, it is linked to our work but the issues with the site far exceed our reach. It is the Mod teams responsibility to nurture a welcoming community that fosters quality discussion, quantity is the owners problem, there are dozens of things that could be done to encourage new sign ups beyond the Mod teams capabilities. Us banning bigots/trolls, etc. Is simply us doing our role.

Yeah with all due respect to the mod team (it's a credit to you folks that you still show up and help out, the forum having become such a small pond) it's kinda been the wild west for a while now, with politics seemingly the only red line.

Moderation has became more relaxed lately and I keep taking breaks from the forum, I don't follow things anywhere near as much as I used to, I think it's a case of energy across the board being down, it just feels like the entire site is cruising towards the grave, Lol. Even when I asked dozens of users if they wanted to be Mod, every single one said no, Lmao.

Then if we do moderate we get accused of killing activity, but that's not really our responsibility, if someone is breaking the rules they should be moderated, it's irrelevant whether the site is dying or not, we can't say "Oh I can't moderate this user for breaking the rules because the site is dying" Lol. Then we'd not be doing our responsibility and what would be the point in having Mods at all?

So I fully agree with your initial comment but I will admit that isn't really happening lately, and the forums are less moderated nowadays.

For me, I'm a bit frustrated, when you spend years trying to help the site out even beyond typical mod duties and absolutely nothing has changed in those years, we're still in the same position as always, it feels completely pointless to even bother continuing to try. Staying awake late at night  to help bug test and implement new features, all that stuff, it was all pointless, Lmao.

There's no owner showing leadership for the site, the activity continues to decline, there's no possible way to implement even 10% of the ideas that we have had in the past, and forums in general are dying so there's not really anything we can do about that. There was a time where I was like "Yeah! Lets revive VGChartz!" and trying to come up ideas/features, etc. Really into it, focused on trying to revive the community, creating threads and such as well, now I've just lost all desire and passion for any of that.

At this rate VGChartz would probably be better off being gobbled up by Installbase, Lol.

That may have been me, I remember talking about that with the Mod team/Staff but in all honesty, we have only 1 active unpaid volunteer coder, Lol. So it's unlikely major features will ever be implemented.

I like how Installbase does it, they have articles too but their articles are essentially threads, the article itself doesn't have a comment section at the bottom but if you click "Discussion" at the top of the article then it takes you to the thread for it which does have comments, of course there are complications with doing that here, some can have solutions but I think the major complication would be that writers are paid every 1000 views on an article, we don't want to do anything that hurts writers payment, the payment system would likely have to change to include thread views too alongside article views for the "auto" generated article/threads and that's highly unlikely to be accepted by the owner Imo.

I do think we've entered into a unintentional scenario where due to the low activity of the site, articles and forums are accidentally competing with each other, if there's an article on a piece of news then I imagine a lot of people think there's no point in making a thread on it now. That's why I was trying to come up with a way to merge the two in a manner which doesn't hurt writers income and also helps activity for the forums.

But there's not much point in even coming up with a concept, let alone talking seriously about it, Lmao.

The things being discussed here are rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

Attrition is normal. People get banned, people get bored, people get busy. Even if we stop banning people and that has no adverse effect, you still need a way to bring in new ones, and I don't see any real way to do that.

I will say this. I appreciate the metaphorical crew still tending to the passengers while the captain decides if he wants to steer into the iceberg or spin the wheel. It’s a shell of its former self but it still is a landing spot for long lost users while we wait. Who knows, maybe one day we come in and there’s new paint on the walls. It won’t mean we’re not sinking but they’ll be pretty to look at. That’s a hope I always hold onto. One final page refresh that makes this site usable for mobile and PC and makes searching through old threads functional and makes quoting users not destroy text. It’s a dream at least. 

And by the way, it isn’t like VGC is the only thing that has gotten progressively worse in the past 15 years. It’s par for the course for sure.