Insane Difficulty: Insane Difficulty Redux - Insane Difficulty

Members of the Insane Difficulty community,

It has been brought to my attention lately that the spark that this site once had has somewhat dwindled. The sites management seems to have gone downhill, along with the site's reliability. Something has to be done.

I have a lot more time as of recently, so I really wanted to take the time to make this post and give the community some hope! As of late, I have been seeing people mentioning the creation of a new site. I really think this is, A: Unnecessary and B: Rather detrimental to the site. I would assume that we would lose nearly 80% of the traffic that we get now. We would lose the domain, and all of the data on this site would essentially be an archive. I want to highlight other possible solutions so that we can remain on this domain. This website means WAY too much to me to see it go to a new domain.

As for possible solutions - I know have access to everything Archael does, and am learning the IP board format (fucking terrible, but powerful). I am planning on adding many new features that are available to the IP board community, in an attempt to try and reinvigorate the community. Below are some suggestions for potential things that I may add to the site. I hope to see feedback from everyone.

Leader boards


IP boards recently added a leader boards feature. This will highlight the most active, contributing members of the community. I believe this will give more incentive to take part and contribute in the community and shed light on contributions.

https://invisionpowe...aderboard-r988/

Badges / Achievements


The badges and achievements system was amazing for ID. I loved the idea of video recording yourself completing a challenge and being awarded a badge for completing said challenge. Of course, at first the achievements were mainly for 1.3 as Archael was mainly the only one making the badges, however, I am willing to make graphics for every single achievement that you all come up with. I wouldn't mind having a page displaying who has completed each achievement - perhaps a wiki page.

Tournaments


We need to host more tournaments. I am going to hopefully have an AI tournament again, and am seriously considering hosting a 1.3 tournament.

All of the above are suggestions to try to bring more traffic and engagement to the site which I am willing to take part in / host / create, As far as site maintenance and stability goes, I have been working with Archael on solutions to make sure the site remains usable and reliable. There are a multitude of different security features that we can implement as well.

Last but not least, I would like to appoint a few more moderators. I'm also considering adding a few more groups for fun.

I wanted to end by letting you all know how much the community means to me. I know i haven't been around much lately, but it's not because I don't want to be. I hope everyone is doing well and I will do everything I can to get the community back on track. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

EDIT: Fixing the Captcha as we speak. Sorry for being so late on this. Exam week has kept me busy.

Thank you so much Insane Difficulty,

~FFTA

The number one bullet point on your post should be addressing the registration issues.

No registration = no new traffic = dying community, no matter how many bells and whistles you slap on the site.

BTB, on 03 December 2016 - 12:52 PM, said:

I tested registration with no problem. Are people still having issues?

Edit:
Fixing the captcha

I honestly don't care one way or the other, so long as I'm on a site that works and has active admins. It's that second part where ID tends to drop the ball - you and Arch just aren't around that much these days in spite of posts like these promising otherwise, and it hurts the community as a whole. Rynzer, Sega, and Emmy all waited a lot longer than they should have to get boards as a direct result of this absence, and it's hard for a community to grow when its leaders are MIA.

Regardless of whether or not you plan on spending more time around the site in the coming months, I think it would be greatly served by the presence of another admin who has the ability to manage things as you do. And I can think of several active, well-respected members of the community who would be ideal for the job.

Seconded. If not access to 'everything archael did' to critical things like the creation of a board that come up more frequently then 'recoding the entire site structure'. I'll leave nominations for said individuals to others however.

Archael pays for the website (quite a bit), and appointed me an Admin mainly out of trust (I've known him for 8 or 9 years before I became admin). We have moderators for leading.

It's not up to me to give another person access to the FTP, nor do I think it is a good idea. Of course we have trusted members, but the problems aren't that common to where we need 5 different people accessing the FTP at one time. So long as the problems are fixed in a timely manner (I apologize for the past month or so, that is not timely). I don't think that should be that much of an issue anyway.

I think we can have more moderators, though.

The problem is not a lack of moderators - far from it, this is a community that excels in keeping itself in check. The problem is that when administrative tasks need to be done, such as fixing broken registration or setting up new talent on the site with a board for their mods, it takes at least several months (and usually several established members reaching out to you on numerous occasions) to happen. This sort of thing has been going on for a *lot* longer than a month or so - a year or two is a bit closer to it.

Quote

Quote

The reason people are talking about putting together a new site is the same reason we put together a discord - what we have doesn't work.
What is detrimental to the site is going for the better part of a year with broken registrations. Going for months on end where the only traffic we generated were trying to sell us MMO gold and dick cream. Going for months on end with a chat system that people had to go thru 3 VPN's and their neighbor's wireless before they could access it - on the off chance it was up. Yeah. That sort of thing is a little detrimental to site traffic.

You wanna see the most active members of the community? Log into Discord.
You wanna see 1.3 tourneys? Log into Discord.
You wanna see where the active modders are? Log into Discord - and ask them where they're hosting their products since ID has become decidedly unreliable.

It is no wonder people are making plans that don't center on the current infrastructure - time has proven that system to be unreliable. Archael has pulled a vanishing act of late and you've been as distant - and when we finally contacted you and laid all this out, we got silence in return.

I get that life happens. I really do. But going silent for months on end then showing up like 'hai guise, i got badges, can we still be friends?' is more than a little insulting.

Badges?

We don't need no stinkin' badges.

And for the record, I ain't fallin' for this drivel. 'I'm sorry I haven't paid any attention to you! Please don't move on with your life!' doesn't hold water for me. Your credibility is shot.

Good day, sir.

^ +1 for wrestling reference.


But yeah, I think everyone has pretty much stated what I was gonna say on the matter.

arcenierin, on 03 December 2016 - 02:40 PM, said:

"got silence in return"


I read every single post on the general forum. lol.

The amount of time I've contributed to growing and helping create this community over the years doesn't mean anything to you, but I devoted 4 or 5 solid years helping Archael with this site and have gained many amazing friends and acquaintances because of it.


I love this community and I think creating another site would completely destroy it for quite some time. The amount of time it took to accrue members of the quality we have here is astonishing. It's a very niche community.

What we have here is a very professional website that needs a little work, and I wasn't able to fix it for awhile, and I apologize. I didn't have the time to learn the ropes of the shit show that is IP boards, and had to relay HUNDREDS of requests to Archael. Managing a site with this kind of traffic is difficult for 1 person, and I'm learning.

If you think I haven't payed attention to you, you are utterly clueless. Just like all other people, I have things I need to do. FULL TIME student with a FULL TIME job doesn't leave me much time, yet I'm still trying to fix these issues and always have. The recent ones haven't been as clear, and I've been on the phone with Archael for hours trying to resolve some of the stuff. I talk to Advent on a daily basis about site issues as well, and I'm trying to get more opinions from other people so I can fix this. The "badges" and other things I brought up because of Hart Hunt's post about pride in the community, and what it is lacking. I'm trying to bring back some of the popular things that the community had before that made it so unique.

If you guys want to come on here and down vote my post, downplay my performance, and basically shut down everything I've brought to the table, that is fine. But you cannot sit here and tell me that this is some kind of a ploy to keep you from "moving on." I'm here, right now, attempting to fix these issues, and I'm sorry that life got in the way of this. In the future, I will try to improve as I learn IP boards over the next few weeks.

All I am asking for is support rather than ridicule, especially after all the time I have put into this site over multiple years (minus the past months). Anyone who actually knows me knows how much this community means to me. I wasn't taking it for granted, I just didn't really realize how bad things really were.

Lets not forget the countless hours Archael spent creating this site and what brought us all together. We are not taking it for granted. Please reach out to me over private message if you have something more personal to say.

As for Arcenierin, your toxicity is unappreciated, and you have no idea what I've put into this site over the years. Your suggestions have been noted, however.

FFTA, on 03 December 2016 - 01:55 PM, said:

We may not need five people accessing the FTP at one time. But for the last several months, we have had effectively zero.

If you feel that you can really stick with it, then great! By all means, I'd love to see everything up and running again. But if you feel yourself slipping, or real life starts getting in the way again, you should probably find somebody you trust and give them the access they need to sort out the site's problems, even if you have good reasons why you have not done the work yourself. People have not only begun discussing alternatives, but also thinking about how we would actually go about implementing them. If you leave the site for another month without giving somebody a copy of the keys, there's a small yet meaningful chance that there will not be a site to come back to.

But if you can stick with it, then good luck. We'll be behind you. I appreciate what you've done for the site in the past and I hope it can continue.

Arc has a point, heavy-handed as it may be. Regardless of the effort that went into making this site what it is, the simple fact of the matter is that it is currently dying for lack of care. You wouldn't forget to water a plant and then wonder why it died.

As I said above, I really have no vested interest or concern one way or another other than residing on a site that is functional. I'm trying to tell you as plainly and clearly as I can what has got us to the point that we're at, but what you do with that information is entirely up to you.

BTB, on 03 December 2016 - 03:23 PM, said:

As of right now, the only problem I see with functionality is registration not working (which is a big problem).

New forum additions is something I will have to fix over long term, unless we have some on queue that I haven't been informed about.

Of course Arc has a point.

Yeah, until registration gets fixed a lot of this conversation is moot. I'm glad that you're taking an interest in revitalizing things around here, and that's very much the first step in doing so.

FFTA, on 03 December 2016 - 03:28 PM, said:

So arc can't post a reply so I'm gonna post it for him

Basically Arc said that if you want a chance to address things about the site as a whole and stuff, log onto discord tonight.

I'm gonna make a proper post later, but for the tkme being I wanted to clarify how the other thread is.not about the site lacking a sense of pride - On the contrary, it's more about the change of paradigm about what the site is and has become. I feel the ID members still have a strong sense of unity, something that has been manifested very clearly when the site went down a few days ago. We just needed to figure out what we changed into, if we did at all.

1. A mention in the "State of insanedifficulty" forum post talking about registration being broken in October. I believe that registration has been an issue since the summer. That's a LONG time to go.

2. The only fix done for this in these many months was turning off email validation, which.... isn't the issue.

3. Rynzer had to make the news post saying "Hey yeah, registration is broken" because we've been getting people joining discord on what feels like a near-daily basis to ask what's wrong with the site. We still get them regularly.

4. The original post you had here didn't mention this issue AT ALL.

5. Your last post before making this one was in mid-october.

6. The site went down for most of a day saying that the account had been suspended, considering all the previous shit we essentially had to assume that the site was down permanently.

So taking all that in mind, you think that we're overreacting when this site has gone to shit and you get mad when we try to point this out. Regardless of work done in the past there has been little communication and virtually no work done that we can see to actually remedy the situation that has been persisting for months. On top of it, you pop in and start talking about adding new features to a site THAT PEOPLE CAN'T JOIN.

Another issue is a HUGE lack of communication. I respect that maybe something's going on that prevents work from being done on the site by you or archael. Most of us don't really have any idea that attempted posts about things being broken would even reach you. Seldom do we seem to hear any response, and it's ony a few of us that have outside means to contact you (me not among them), and the public doesn't see that anyway. Being public about what exactly is going on, what you're working on, what's wrong, what's fixed would be helpful, just in making yourself more accessible to the community while it happens. You or archael being so very seldom seen or accessible to the public feels like it's difficult to even convey that 'hey, there's a problem' or 'hey, staff is working on it.'

We're willing to work with you. None of us WANT to move. But we never see or hear about work being done, or see or hear from the developers who are doing it. And yes, broken captcha being around for a while was and is a problem that brought users to the discord because 'site didn't work.' If this is fixed, it's a step in the right direction bringing us back to a functioning site. While yes, maybe new features are nice, they aren't our concern.

But I'm just going in circles now. TL;DR, be more public. Stay in contact and communication with the users. Let us see that things are being done.

Nowea, on 03 December 2016 - 06:00 PM, said:

I don't think anyone is overreacting.

When I site says "This account has been suspended," it means it wasn't payed for. Archael didn't pay the bill on time so the site temporarily went down. Most of the people I talked to understood this, it's fairly obvious.

I'm saying, show a little respect. I've addressed why I wasn't active with hardly any detail at all, and it looks like I'm going to have to make a full post addressing that as well with the way I'm being treated.

I'm here now, and I'm trying to help get things straightened out. The only thing I can gather from this is that people who haven't really contributed anything to the site in general are being very hostile with me, which is not the way to go about it, especially with all I've been through in the past months.

You don't have to explain yourself. You've been busy, I get it. I completely understand. That's not a problem, and I'm certainly not blaming you for not being around to tend to things. What I *am* saying is that someone else should be promoted to help out when you're not here.

For the record, the registration issues at this site date back to when I first started here. I had to bug Archael personally to get my account working, after which he offered me my own forum. That was the ID I remember joining, and I feel I owe it to newer members of the site to pay that same kindness I was shown forward. I keep repeating myself because it makes me sad when I have to harass you so that newer members can gets boards or when I have to tell people who pop up in Discord that the site registration is broken. This place is better than that, and I know it can be if you'll just let the community help you out.