How can we improve forums

Nobody uses new forums compared to old forums, player engagement is actually down. What do you guys want changed.

Is the problem not a shrinking active player base/lack of players on the server rather than an issue with the forums? More people use discord than forums nowadays as it’s more convenient.

The new forums are also a bit of a pain on mobile which I reckon is where most of the traffic comes from. Anyone got site analytics?

Go back to old forum style i dont like this fourm it too complicated

The UI is annoying me
some settle changes i would make personally
new topics should be front and center. The fact that these topics are to the side and take up a small percentage of the screen is annoying.
Along with that, I would like to see the author of the topic, not just the last reply. And more than the profile pic, like the actual authors name.

There needs to be more emphasis on forums. We have no organization. With no forums the only option we had was discord. So we got comfortable with discord. Now there is forums nobody wants to switch back. This is important that we switch back because discord is not readily available for new players. VS. just viewing forums (and we pay for a website)

The first step is to improve Engagement. Discord its easy to have a small conversation. But its hard to keep track of topics being talked about. We should move dev updates from #development-updates into a forum thread. And such. This way players of the community can directly talk about their opinion on this topic by replying to the thread. In discord, somebody could complain in #general-chat but that conversation quickly gets lost though out time.

This does not have to be the only example. If we take more emphasis off of discord and put it on the forums, This website would be used more.

The next thing that needs to be implemented is also from discord. That is the disorganization of server departments. There is no single place to see all department and sub-department updates. This hurts the communication between server and community if players don’t know what is going on in the departments. We recently merged a whole bunch of departments together to just a few discord servers, but I feel that this made the situation worse, as now the discord servers are split between the departments that were once separate just being mashed under one department.
Departments need their own threads, so updates and news can all be found in one place and that is the forums. I personally have no idea what is going on with any department because i am not going to check every server the departments are on. And on top of that some discord servers for departments have been abandoned due to this merging. Making finding relevant information even more of a struggle.

If we want to make the forums more useful, we would have to become less reliant off discord.

This. Pretty much the old forums looked ugly but was actually powerful in delivering all the important and need-to-know information on a glance. This new forum does’t have a good reply system and lacks the definition between comments that the original phpbb style did best. I know we switched because the forums got hacked but I genuinely think original forums > new forums.

This. I personally think the new forums were released in a hurry…instead of taking the time to properly research software and design a site…

We took so much time getting them ready, took months. It was not done in a hurry, just none of us admins are really web developers so. Once we chose this software thats sorta what we went with.

this ^. gehard they did spend a lot of time making sure the forums was functional for release but i think it was clear that nobody here really has web development expirence to make anything better. also please ultra and others dont take this as an insult to the website, it is really good and the fact we even have one still is amazing, it just has its downsides

The forums is ok, it has the essentials of what we need plus the discord.
I think the forums is not too big of an issue that need to be fix or change at this moment.
I believe the issue that should be address as soon as possible is aspects of the server itself so we can increase traffic of new players and increase the retention rate of active players so they will play more time per session.
Stuff that could be implemented is as follows:

• 24/7 events that can be hosted automatically without staff.
• themed events with special/rare prizes (an example would be the christmas event. During this event retantion rate of active players increased drastically.)
• Fun or better public jobs.
• Fix the tutorial thing new players have to complete, make it fast and easy or better make it optional and add /warp tutorial so when new players feel interest enough they will do the tutorial by theirselves.
• Fix the voting crates and where the server appears there, try to pay there so our server appears sponsored in the first page. We can make a paypal for this that any admin can run to make the monthly payments, i could donate 10$ a month for this, im sure players that like the server and have been paying premium for long time wouldnt mine spending 1-10$ a month to see the server improve with.
  Im sure there is more than can be improved but this would be a good start.

I have been working on event hub since January. Along with roleplay jobs and just refreshing the player experience. I am doing this solo. I can demo you anytime.
Most of what you listed above is already being done. Vote crates are last on my list for the next update.

add banners

I think the only thing that really should change is turning the default topic view from “Categories” to “Latest”, i forgot i had changed that for myself and being signed out, it does look complicated compared to the “Latest” view which is more reminiscent of the old forum

That’s how I view the forums but I have to open the website, click on the drop down and then click latest, which takes about 3 seconds which is the end of the world because I wanna be straight routed to latest when I have logged into the site

lol just bookmark hellominers.com/latest

ez fix

top 10 lifehacks the government doesnt want you to know

Thought I’d weigh in here a bit;

Discourse is for all intents and purposes designed for fluid and active engagement as a platform. For HelloMiners, the change from phpBB (old forum platform) to Discourse is honestly a heavy change.

Mainly because everything works! But also for the end user as things aren’t quite where they once thought they’d be.

It’s certainly different, I mean you could compare XenForo (HelloClan’s forum software) to HelloMiner’s and you might see a few keynote changes in the form of styling / quick links etc.

Beyond that and the name, everything else is about the same. Fresh looks and the like, but suffering from the same problem - visitors.

From my personal experience, on HelloClan’s side, our players / visitors / members etc prefer their own platform. Nowadays, very little is actually processed through the website. About 88% of activity lays with Discord and the remainder between Facebook, Twitter & Reddit.

Why?

• Ease of access?
• Not up for making another account?
• Concerned for privacy maybe?

I’ve pondered these questions along with a few others but I seem to reach the same conclusion - especially after reviewing other gaming communities forum / social setup. That conclusion being that forums are simply not as crucial as they once were.

I know that sounds brash, but considering the uprising of various other platforms for gamers specifically as well as general social interaction, forums are becoming…redundant.

Forums were used primarily to interact, share media deal with “issues” etc. Nowadays all that is done on several other platforms (I’m looking at you Discord) and thus it’s not generating a hell of a lot of interest in “signing up for a forum account”.

Just my viewpoint on this. I was at a stage even considering turning the HelloClan website into an actual website in the general sense that didn’t have any forums, just resources, game server pages etc. Though, seems that we hold on to the old times.

TL;DR
I personally think that there isn’t much, if anything at all, wrong with the forum and it’s setup. It has to do with how forums are viewed by the visitors.

This is just my opinion on the new forums so it only reflects my concerns and some probably aren’t shared with others:

• Forum layout is convoluted and the text is either too small or too large in some areas.

• Why isn’t there a forum button in the navbar? I feel like having it be a separate section of the site would be nice.

• Latest posts and categories tab are close together so its kind of hard to read coming from someone who has difficulty piecing together words when its surrounded by colors/flashing boxes and lots of text.

Ironically this is the highest engagement in a forums post recently.