Why has CivFanatics overtaken Apolyton in members?

[OzzyKP]

So instead of sitting in our rocking chairs bemoaning Apolyton's fall from grace and looking back on the good old days, what are we gonna do?

The best advice to get ahead with any project, be it a company or a website (or civ game) is to figure out what you do best and do it better than anyone.

Poly just can't compete with CFC in terms of modding.

Many people have mentioned that Apolyton has a better community. So play to that. The Polycast is good (though I admit I've never listened to one), the ApolyCon was good. Do more community building events. Hold regularly scheduled online chats perhaps. Create a community blog that members can all participate in, it'll create more content and get buy-in from more people.

Focus more on the games that CFC doesn't cover.

Redesign the ugly, confusing homepage.

Upgrade the forums, make use of some of the new hacks for vBulletin. Maybe install an arcade here. One thing I did on my own forum was install an arcade and require a certain number of posts to play in it (like Poly does with avatars and such) and then every so often open the arcade up to everyone and send an e-mail to all registered users announcing that for the next 2 weeks everyone is allowed in the arcade. It really boosted traffic during that time with a lot of people who hadn't checked the forum in months or years came back. A few of them even stayed.

Develop some RSS feeds for the news and actively solicit other civ related sites to use your news feeds. That'll increase the visibility of Apolyton.

Maybe encourage the Spanish community to generate more content for the page in Spanish and capture more of that niche.

Host more sites. Doing other people favors creates affinity for Apolyton. As they grow so do you.

Just some ideas. But yea, play to our strengths, whatever those are.

Oh, and the DL dance definitely needs to stop. It creates a hostile atmosphere right from the get-go and more than anything Apolyton needs to be welcoming of new people to stop this site from dying. Mods should take a stronger hand when posters are being unwelcoming to newbies.

[OzzyKP]

Heaven forbid I make a list like that without adding a plug... one thing that Apolyton has that CFC doesn't have is Diplogames. Maybe the site could push that more and get a stronger diplogame community going.

[SlowwHand]

CFC is a SP site. They took a dive when Civ 3 came out, and I decided **** them.

[Solver]

I may not go into any details, but the administration and staff are, of course, aware of the issues. So there are plans for various improvements that are needed. I think it's clear to anyone that the forum pages need a redesign, as do most part of the site .

I'm really starting to doubt, though, the "better community" part of Apolyton. In a good community, new posters are welcomed, not given silly DL dances. Then there's the dubious practice of people making the same jokes for months at end, or repeating the same post dozens of times. Doesn't make it too surprising that people don't stick around.

[Solver]

One thing I'm really disappointed about is the response to this request. Apolyton's entry on Wikipedia should be improved. There are even posts that state where to get possibly useful information, but sadly, no one has undertaken the task of improving that entry .

[Sirotnikov]

I think that if the owners like it, we could come up with a list of suggestions and reforms for poly.

This in terms of structure of the site's website and forums parts.


I deal with information management and usability as part of my current job. I believe this can be greatly improved in poly, and improve both poly's rankings and make people come and stay longer.

I bet that lots of people (including myself) will pick up different tasks and stick to them.

[Solver]

Actually, I believe your thread from a while ago, where you angrily vented about Apolyton, covered most points for improvements. I haven't read it for a while, but remember it being largely spot-on.

[Sirotnikov]

If the powers that be would like, I'd happily use what little brain power I have, to make a good long list of suggestions. Then post a non-rant, non-spam thread about it in the community forum.

Then we'll set up task groups to tackle the different chores.

I have experience in design and graphics. I'm also handy with HTML, JS, some SQL.

I can't promise absolute devotion though, as I'm currently married to the Israeli Army and all. And I recently began dating this chick

Bu

[Sirotnikov]

Oh, and the DL dance definitely needs to stop. It creates a hostile atmosphere right from the get-go and more than anything Apolyton needs to be welcoming of new people to stop this site from dying. Mods should take a stronger hand when posters are being unwelcoming to newbies.

Is the DL dance prevalent outside of the OT?

I thought it was mainly used here, because, well... frankly so many newcomers are DLs.

[Solver]

I'm sure you could convince the IDF that redesigning Apolyton is a matter of great importance to the Jewish people .

[Solver]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
Is the DL dance prevalent outside of the OT?

I thought it was mainly used here, because, well... frankly so many newcomers are DLs.

It used to be fairly common in the Civ4 forums back when we had many new posters, along with other unwelcoming messages. I always deleted those on sight, though, at the very least.

[Jon Shafer]

This thread prompted me to go and look through some of the old Civ 3 archives. Ah, memories. I had forgotten the incredible amount of traffic this place got before. The Civ 3 Democracy Game forum alone was more active than all Civ 3 and Civ 4-related forums these days.

[Solver]

Well, back in the day, you were also a horrible spammer yourself . But yeah, in a way, those were the good old times . Though Civ3 itself was a much worse game. Meh. I wanna go to Hunt Valley.

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by Solver
Well, back in the day, you were also a horrible spammer yourself . But yeah, in a way, those were the good old times . Though Civ3 itself was a much worse game. Meh. I wanna go to Hunt Valley.

Ha. Again with the DG-hate. I spammed very rarely. Most of my posts were related to the games. And most were quite long at that. Everyone just thought DGing in general was spam so I got labelled as the worst offender.

Civ 3 was a lot of fun. Even though it's not quite the level of 4 it's still amazing, particularly for me because it was my first 'Civ experience'. I doubt I'll ever play any other game nearly as much.

And Hunt Valley isn't all it's cracked up to be. This place always smells like nutmeg, chili powder, cinnamon, pepper... or some combination of them... because the McCormick Spice Co. HQ is about a mile from Firaxis.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Solver
Well, back in the day, you were also a horrible spammer yourself

So what you're trying to say is that spamming contributes to community