Forums: We have them September edition

Welcome to the next installment of the Forums: We have them article. This month I’m not going to talk about PAX. That’s the hip thing right now and I’m excited, but I figure I’ll save those stories until next month. This month I’m taking a lead from the Weekly Musing and the PAX panel.

I’m going to talk about the community and more specifically the Forum community. I think it’s high time I gave the whole lot of you some serious props for being awesome. So let’s get to it shall we?

We are all part of this huge community that is Destructoid. However, like any other large community, there are smaller groups that flock to specific areas of the site. Some hangout in the community blogs, some in IRC and some in the Forums. While this is great, I think some people forget or don’t realize that we are all part of the same whole. This fantastic site that more then any other gaming site, promotes the community.

Now most would think this is the part where I would jump to bashing parts of the community, point out how they are “doing it wrong” or something. The truth of the matter is that by and large, this community as a whole is amazing. Sure, bad apples turn up and everyone’s opinion of who those bad apples are depends on the person, but as compared to most communities, they are pretty rare here comparatively.

Anyway, let’s talk about the Forum community. I’m coming up on a year of managing the Forums here and in that year the Forums have undergone a whole bunch of changes. People have left and a whole horde of new people have joined up. As I look at the forums at the moment, we have 935 active members. That’s not just total users, that is people that regularly come by the forums. Since the forums were upgraded in January there has been 130,467 posts made. Regardless of the “quality” of those posts that’s quite a bit of activity. When I started doing these articles in April our highest number of users on at once was 118. It’s currently at 349.

Did you know that Overly Positive lists the Forums in their “fantastic forums” sidebar? Did you know that people mention the Forums in discussions over on Metacritic? That says to me “healthy community” and it couldn’t make me happier. Something else I want to point out, as you all know, I send links to threads every week for Hamza’s daily recaps and the last couple months have been amazing. If you’ve never been over to the forums, check those links in the daily recaps and jump in. I know some of you are doing it (because I see the threads activity jump) and I want to encourage more people. Don’t worry about being new and don’t worry about doing an intro first (but do make one, it helps).

Something else I want to point out is the posting guide. While it’s mostly for new people so they know where to put their posts, there is a mini-FAQ at the end that has some neat tricks for all users.

Finally, I want to say thank you to all of you. While I’m the “Forum boss” as Hamza says, I’m not the one making all those posts. I’m not the one doing amazing fan art. I’m not the one who is getting referenced and quoted on other sites. I’m not the one who makes the forums full of awesome. The subject of the weekly musing was “How to make communities suck less”. My response is to point straight at our community and say “There you go”. I just make the bouncy castle for you guys to play in and while that is hard work, it’s up to you guys to fill it with amazing stuff. It’s all of you. The community. It’s all of you that deserve the credit for how great the forums are.

Thank you for making my job easy and fun.

As always, if you lurk, sign up and post. If you’ve never been, come check us out. If you post all the time, then keep it up! My private messages are always open and you can send me anything from questions, new banners or just bounce some ideas off me. Don’t be shy!