First off, a quick correction, I actually meant the movies were driving the passion out of ME to pursue those avenues, not everybody.
Onslaught Six wrote:How about something like a review section?
You're always so timely and helpful.
andersonh1 wrote:Hard to say. Are we promoting the forums in other places, or inviting others to come and post here? I wonder if visibility isn't the issue here? The small number of us posting here surely means that discussion is going to be somewhat slow.
I have always had a light touch pursuing others to come. I was hoping this would become an "everybody here is part of the running of the site" thing where they invited folks and they posted news and threw out ideas. I'm not doing any link trades, that leads to frustration. I haven't posted any advertising to recoup my server costs in the hope that it would bring in folks, there don't seem to be a lot of non-profit TF sites anymore. I have been focusing on search engine quality, but as we're a forum that already takes care of itself largely.
When the Q&A started, that was a big help in getting traffic, it was newsworthy unto itself, our work spoke for who we are here. But as Hasbro's answers became more pat, and less sites continued participating, folks lost interest and less sites linked to the other answers.
News is always a draw, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because I am too worn out to do the photograph thing lately, and I'm not deep on the pulse of TF to get sources and such. You and O6 have been doing good with news, if we had a little more constant news I would be able to redesign the front end a little, but that's a lot of work on all our parts and nobody else is supporting.
Onslaught Six wrote:I had this idea: What about some kind of podcast? You think we can rig something like that together? I've sorta always wanted to do something like that, and if we have enough people on the forum interested in participating (and we can schedule that kind of thing conveniently)...
I know next to nothing about podcasts, I don't understand their appeal because I prefer the written word to the spoken one. I could host it off-site through a podcasting hosting site, so it wouldn't impact our traffic needs (or I could host it here, it shouldn't be a problem for now). And I have a golden, velvety voice with a toy focus to add to the conversation. But basically, I wouldn't be the one holding the reins on it, you guys would have to create a format, a timeframe that fits your needs, something that is interesting, and a way to stretch it in the lean times. Perhaps we could set it up to record on Skype.
Dominic wrote:I do like the idea of a podcast. Is this something we can produce reliably and consistently?
It has the nature of being free, though participants will need to get a headset - skype is free, but you have to have a quality mic for recording. If we used Skype, we could have o86!
Even discounting its (dubious to begin with) context, RiD has more engineering and aesthetic similarities to "Beast Wars" and "Beast Machines" than any other line. (As O6 pointed out, it uses molds from every line that preceeded it.) The modern (for the time) moulds in RiD use Beast Era engineering.
That is only true of the car brothers, not Prime, Magnus, Rail Racer trio, or Gigatron.
Maybe we should organize the forums in a way similar to have DvD organizes his page. Toy lines could be grouped together by era, but without regard to how active they are. This saves us from having to move one forum or another around, or creating a "modern ________" when the old "___________" line is revived.
You mean the same DvD who has 5 eras in his header, and one of them reads "RiD - AEC"?
Gomess wrote:As I've previously said, I'm totally down with a "by era" format. Very intuitive, especially for newbies (and I AM a newbie, where contemporary lines are concerned; I have no idea what Generations is, for example).
IMO, it has to be focused enough so that folks just jumping in get it by toy line, since the brand is centered around it. Generations is Classics 3.0.
Onslaught Six wrote:"Dear Hasbro, how should we organize our forums?"
Ha! He meant where does Hasbro organize it. I suspect they don't classify it by any of that, it's a line off to the side like Alternators and Playskool, slightly above SWTF and Built-to-Rule, maybe only slightly less forgotten than Animorphs.
Dominic wrote:"Generations" looks to be the next iterations of "Universe" or ""Classics". It provides justification for Sparky's idea to move "Robots in Disguise" to a misc forum section. As cumbersome as that could get, Hasbro is kind of forcing our hand on it. It also has a TFU style Thrust.
I absolutely don't follow the logic here. Generations is the new name for Classics
therefore RID should be the only line in a MISC line? Granted, it's been a while since I took any highschool tests, but I don't think that'd be a valid correlative statement. How does one lead to the next?
Moving RiD to the Beast Section would not make the forums any more cumbersome. But, it would make them more consistent.
Except for that whole "Beast Era ended at Beast Machines" thing, and the fact that it wouldn't improve the flow of the forums since it wouldn't be changing
The Then's structure.
I am seriously thinking we should ask Hasbro how they organize their lines, and organize our forums accordingly. (How do *they* count RiD?) We could use similar logic when we amp up the site, as I know JT wants to do.
It'll be one of those things that we'd finally get a real answer on, but we'd have to wait until May.
Onslaught Six wrote:Mostly true, yeah--although it was the mainline from 2001-2002, and Armada was 2002-2003 and so on...Roughly, you can sort of break the forums down to the 80s, the 90s and the 00s, with 2006 (Classics) and 2007 (Movie) still being made as we go (albeit under different names). This is also ignoring that G2 was the early-to-mid 90s, mind you.
G2 is easily ignorable. Almost no entertainment or product line support, and a short toy line whose foundation was garish repaints.
Gomess wrote:Actually, something I've wanted to suggest for awhile: more images! The blank backgrounds behind each forum should contain *some* kind of visual representation of that series. Toy photos? Tech spec art? Something!
An interesting idea. I'll consider it, it's definitely doable but would require a lot of work and would take up some space on the front page. Toy Photos are the easiest to work with because they are instantly recognizable even when they're truncated (which they'll have to be), and some lines don't have Techspec art.
Also, what's with the order of the insignias in the top banner? Good, evil, evil, neutral, good, evil...? Vehicles, vehicles, animals, vehicles, anima-- Nope, I don't get it. >_>
The order is that it starts and ends with the G1 factions, and also accommodates everybody else. It's meant to be a statement of all-inclusive of the views we represent, hence it's the eyes and not the whole logos (that is still quite inspired, thanks again Anderson). The order is merely what I felt was visually attractive and didn't keep brands right next to each other, because IMO we all mix it up, we're past the "trukk not munky" phase to where we can be fans of Beast Wars and G1 and Cybertron and Animated or whatever else. Plus, I couldn't think of anything else to make into our site logo, so faction symbols made the most sense. I actually have a thread and a blog about this:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=160
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuse ... =437197739
andersonh1 wrote:And (Classics) Thrust as well, right? There's also an upcoming Seaspray, but he may be packaged under the regular main line, for some reason.
For reasons I cannot comprehend, it's an ROTF toy, but the ROTF packaging coming up omits any reference to the movie name, so it's just "TransFormers" but it's different from the Generations line.
Dominic wrote:Images can arse up load times, especially for guys like me who view this page through their phone more often than a desk top.
I would create them as CSS backgrounds so they don't force the page to wait while it loads, and I always keep images small, but I do take your point. I could create a mobile view version, but so many smartphones bypass them anyway.
Oh, that reminds me, you should try Opera Mobile for your Blackberry, it's a better browser than the one built in - faster and more tools.
Gomess wrote:Hmm, I guess... tiny individual logos then?? If one of JT's concerns is attracting new members, the fact that the main board resembles a Text version of the Yellow Pages (but blue!) might be the first point to address.
~Do take my jokey criticisms of the board as they are intended, I'm not REALLY an AllSpark sleeper. =3
The site is a generic out-of-the-box system with just a small alteration to the header for our graphics. I like the clean look of the existing template, but I've never wanted to stay with it, I just haven't had ideas to renovate it, so the suggestions are not lost on me.
O6 wrote:Seaspray is. I suspect this is because Generations is a deluxe-only line, unlike Classics or Universe.
I think it's not about that, but about WHEN it's getting released.
My point was that it already 'is' sort of broken down by decade, in the vaguest of ways. I'm not particularly concerned with it, though--what we've got now works, and I personally think we're spending way too much time debating it. It works fine where it is--and honestly...dudes, have we ever had a discussion about RID that *wasn't* "It's in continuity" or "Where should the forum be?"
While I agree with you on pretty much all of it, the discussion is bringing in a lot of voices who are trying to freshen up the site in other ways so it has value even if nothing changes about RID in the end.
They're called podcasts because people...sometimes listen to them on their iPods, I guess?
That is correct.
I actually don't like the term all that much to begin with, but it's kind of a standard thing now, so whatever.
EXACTLY how I feel!