by toprob » Thu Aug 27, 2015 10:39 am
Just a few things which I've noticed lately -- I track clicks to my site, which is basically whenever someone clicks on a link on another site. NZFF always used to be the top of the list each month, but these days Facebook performs 1000% better for me. I know that Facebook has a bad rep with some, and I can certainly see why if you gauged it by what was in the media, but really all it needs is a bit of planning, and it can be very useful. If you see something interesting, you can share it, comment on it, or just show your support by 'liking' it.
You do need to monitor what is posted on your feed, but you soon learn who posts all the rubbish posts, and you can turn them off quite easily. I read a lot less 'rubbish' posts on Facebook than I do here at NZFF...
A forum is still a great way to keep track of the huge amount of knowledge which people pick up over time. However for that to work, the 'search' function needs to work, otherwise nobody will know where the good stuff is. These days a lot of people actually use a search engine like Google or Bing to browse the web -- I get about 8 times the visitors from search results, rather than links. This just goes to show that the web is always developing, and the new capabilities have surpassed the ability to match those capabilities here at NZFF.
I've said before that maybe we don't need a 'forum' as such, but a more general content management system, like Wordpress, which can cater for most needs, including a forum.... but imagine a 'home' page with current news, posts, screenshot gallery, all linked to social media sites, so that the right post can reach thousands on Facebook within hours. I don't mean like some of the existing fs news sites, which tend to grow like topsy, with not a lot of planning, and end up looking like a dog's breakfast.
Moving away from the restrictions of a forum, we could have 10 or 20 regulars with blogs, so that visitors can pick and choose their topics of interest, rather than have to wade through everything.
Michael makes some good points about the current state of NZ simming, this is broader than NZFF. I do think that there is still a place for all aspects of simming here, but things have changed a lot over the last decade, including the rise of payware, which was previously seen as a very negative direction, but has turned out to be the saviour of flightsim in some respects, and the fall of the desktop PC, which has kind of left our simulator high and dry.
I grizzle a lot about Orbx, but they have done a great job to give the whole scene a kick in the pants. But they can't be seen as the only kick we need, and it is up to simmers to strive for something new and different. That's one thing which the forum doesn't do well, as communities tend to be quite slow to accept change, especially when the membership is a little older than average...
Lately I've been trying to raise some funds to get back into full-time development, and one thing which is apparent is that there are a lot of people out there who want to develop something, mainly I get to hear about scenery, but there are a lot of other directions to take. The fact that they don't always follow through is partly down to the lack of support from the community, and partly, I know, down to people like me, who could help a lot more, but I have had my own issues to deal with, so I don't have a lot to give at the moment. 2015 was meant to be my year of collaboration, but for this to work I need to able to at least pay my power bill each month, which is my current worry...
But, I do know that it wouldn't take much to revitalise the whole NZ flightsim scene, and there is a lot happening behind the scenes, and I'm very much aware that for me it would mean some sort of break-through to get the ball rolling. This will happen, just never soon enough. And once things do get rolling, it may be that NZFF is no longer the appropriate place to go to get the news out, or to manage things, simply because we have been left behind. In the meantime, I'd like to see less talk about what is wrong with the web these days, and more talk about how we can take advantage of the the way that things like social media have developed, and what people expect to get from a website.
Now, I'm looking at 2016 to get stuck into some collaborative projects, but I'm not longer so confident that it'll happen. I am determined to keep plugging away, but I've very much aware that as each month goes by, I haven't made any real progress to get over the 'bump' which set me back to zero. So if you have any ideas about anything, let me know, either here or via my site, or even via Facebook...
Opps may have to change that flag...
...!
...!
...!
...