But it's been like this for years. I remember a summer where weeks would go by without anything to read.

The real question is do you guys love this place enough to try to resurrect it or are we gonna just leave it dead?

But then we'd have to remember all kinds of new names, and personalities, and it'd just be a hassle...

See? So lets revive it. Quick! Does someone have a Phoenix Down?

I think we need a Phoenix Pinion.

I implemented some of the suggested metadata changes a week ago. My next priority is to look into the prospect of making registrations mandatory for guests (on an IP basis) who have viewed more than 5 threads.

Keep posting your suggestions!

Registrations aren't our problem. I see tons of new people a week, it's getting them to post that is the problem. They all come for the arcade.

Most of the people who register are spam bots. You just never see them because new users have to be approved unless they are posting in the introductions forum. That's why the only time you see spambots, it's in that forum. The mods probably see 10x more spambots than normal users do.

Well that would explain things.

It's nowhere near as bad as it used to be - during the first half of 2010, we regularly had more new spam posts than actual posts by a factor of at least three. These days, I'm lucky if I get to delete one spam thread a week. :(

If anyone is interested, the current stats are: 5059 deleted posts and 1619 deleted threads on the forum. Now these are "soft" deletes, which means that they can be retrieved. I have no way of finding out how many posts and threads have been deleted in total (soft and hard deletes), but it's bound to be a lot more (particularly as this is post #697,061).

I suppose it's possible to go back through every post and see which I can view with my permissions, and which I can't, but I don't want to do it manually, and I can't be bothered writing a script.

As an aside, this is the earliest accessible post: http://zelaron.com/forum/showpost.php?p=4.

I think on May 15th we might start to get some activity as a lot of people here play diablo III. I'm currently playing the open beta (I love it)

We also improved the CAPTCHA around that time. I don't hard delete much, so your stats are probably good. I do move a lot of soft deleted spam threads to the trash.

Is it just that you don't want to take the time to sift through to hard delete them? Because I don't see much of a point of leaving them to be resurrected.

Two reasons why things are soft deleted: in the Mod Drop-down Menu when we select a post/thread, there's an option to "Delete post/thread as spam", which soft deletes the post (and allows us to ban the user in one fell swoop)l and Admin's are the only ones with the permissions to hard delete posts and threads.

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I remember the discussions about changing the CAPTCHA's! Good times. :)

Well what I meant was why not go through and hard delete them all, or would that unban the spam bot?

More work. Also, we don't generally hard delete things so that if questions arise, the evidence is still there. At this point, it probably doesn't matter; more habbit than anything.

I think that our best bet right now would be to harness the influx of people looking to discuss the upcoming blizzard games since a lot of people here already play them

I still think we should try and make our own game. No idea how, though...

Zelaron had its own game, for a while.

We had a game? When did we have a game?

Long ago. I don't even remember what it was called. Mercurial?

Was it before I joined? Was it any good?

Nice, we're already popped up on page 3 for Gaming Forums. I'll have someone blast some links to help speed things up a bit when I get some time.

Nice :D We're getting a bit more active, for instance, I just went to new posts and it wasn't all skurai.

We need more content. allowing anonymous users is the only viable option at this point.

Agreed, we could allow a few posts per IP address then require them to register. Like D3V said in another post, put captchas on it.

We did try guest posts once.





Shit loads of spam.





Turned them off.

Of course, if they can be coupled with a CAPTCHA and a daily post-limit by IP, they may work better.

Edit:

I've just been going over a few threads in the Staff forum to find the ones about guest posting. We decided in the beginning that CAPTCHAs and limits by IPs were a pain, because people wouldn't be able to quick sign-up and post - they'd have to wait for all the confirmation e-mails. After a while, which just so happened to see a huge number of spam posts, it was decided that guest posting was to be stopped, as the vast majority of posts were spam, and we had a tiny ratio of people registering (something like 200:1).

I was thinking an ever post limit by IP, so they can post like 10 times then they have to register.

You're missing the fundamental problem. Our problem isn't that guests come here and are too lazy to register. Our problem is that nobody comes here except for people who are already members and spambots. There are occasionally people playing in the arcade but even lately that is rare. On the off chance that we actually get a real guest, they are usually brought here because of some ancient RPGmaker thread or WC3 maphack thread. They are still going to have little to no interest in posting on the main forums, so if they could make guest posts they would just be digging up shitty old irrelevant threads.

Allowing guests to post is going to do nothing for activity, unless you consider a crapton of spam activity.

In that case, I think we simply need to increase our placement on google for gaming forum. We have an interesting enough name that if someone sees it they are likely to click on it but these days being on the third page for a search means you'll never get clicked.

Zelaron needs to turn into 4chan or 9gag to increase stats, IMO.

But we don't need that shit here too. Then we'll be oldfags, then Zelaron will produce too many memes, and then we'll get cancer.

I take it you are volunteering to pay the team of moderators required to keep our host out of trouble? Because otherwise turning into 4chan will just get Zelaron taken down.

Gameplay videos + URL Watermark + Youtube.

Got no time for it myself atm (maybe when d3 comes out :D) but just throwing it out there.

So we should make gameplay videos like Machinima does?

Yep, alot of forums are doing gameplay and how-to videos.

I'd do it for free.

You probably aren't even old enough to legally view such things.

If I had screen recording software and my computer wasn't complete crap I'd do it in a hear beat. But, sadly, I don't have a good computer or the proper programs.

I could probably do some gameplay videos, but I don't really want to. I mean, I wouldn't mind recording myself playing games, but narrating myself playing games doesn't sound like much fun and I don't have a radio voice.