22 replies to this topic

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

Thats the user statistic I've seen today. I don't know - either the statistic is broken, or we have *lots* of lurkers.

I think the lack of a good coder site has attracted quite some people, but the forum/the threads are not interesting enough to motivate some more people to participate.

Should we do something against that? Maybe it's just me, but I'd like to see some more discussions here.

[.oisyn]

Totally agreed

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

(that's one of the reasons why I've asked noobish opengl questions over the last days btw..)

[eddie]

Well, it would be interesting to see what lurkers are reading, and why they're not participating. Too bad we can't have a lurker poll. :)

I personally am going to sit on the IRC channel during the day, see if I can help interested people with questions. The thing is pretty dead tho, sadly.

[Dia]

I have to agree too. What do you suggest be done to remedy this issue?

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

I know of at least two lurkers that work in the company I'm now working for. I was surprised that they know about devmaster and check the board every once in a while (and that despite the forum inactivity).

[eddie]

Well, ask them why they lurk, instead of contribute.

Is it something we do? Or are they merely interested, but not really involved in gaming?

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

Dia said:

I have to agree too. What do you suggest be done to remedy this issue?

If you have doubts about something you code, or you want to share a cool code, or you want to have a second oppinion on something - start a thread. We all like to discuss, don't we?

I've always thought the average level here is pretty low, but infact it's not. The experienced guys just don't answer to "stupid" questions and don't ask because they don't expect good answers. The beginner question death spiral so to say..

I think this is not true. I've got good answers, sometimes better than I've expected.

[eddie]

To be honest, I find this one of the best places to ask questions. People here aren't too jaded (barring monjardin -- kidding!), and generally they're pretty respectful.

All I can recommend is that we continue policying posters - on both sides of the fence. Encourage people to post well-thought-out posts, and make sure that people giving replies don't demean or condescend people.

Those two things would make me eternally happy. :)

[Methulah]

I'm with that. I've asked some pretty stupid questions over the years I've been here, but I have never once been made feel low about my lack of programming skill.

I think that anyone who has any question whatsoever should just ask it, and that the senior members should encourage newbies by answering their questions in the best way possible, while encouraging well thought out posts and intelligent research.

For example; I don't think that a link to google is an appropriate answer to any question.

[Noor]

the ratio for number of topics vs. number of members is almost 1:1. I don't know if that's a good thing or not

[baldurk]

Noor said:

the ratio for number of topics vs. number of members is almost 1:1. I don't know if that's a good thing or not

there were quite a large number of people transferred over from the original yahoo group who I don't think have ever been around.

Also, I'd imagine that the number of members will grow faster initially, then level off, but the number of posts/topics will grow at, if anything, an increasing rate.

[TheNut]

Quality before quantity =)

I think more interviews and game developer talks in the forum would really spark interest. If everyone came to the forum just to ask a question or post an ad that would be pretty boring. The Game Developer Conference is coming up and they got quite a lot of goodies this year… If anyone is attending that, it would be cool to get some kind of live footage/feedback; exclusive only to DevMaster >=)

[Goz]

Is there no way we can have the "noob questions" forum back?

[darqSHADOW]

The majority of the lurkers are search engine spiders, I guarantee it. On the Truevision3D forums our record was over 200 spiders on the site at once -- I'm sure DevMaster will get there as the content grows.

DS

[monjardin]

True. Just look at Who's Online. Google and Yahoo pound this site constantly.

[Reedbeta]

Which isn't a bad thing, as it means we'll show up in more searches =)

[monjardin]

No kidding! When I google my name I get DevMaster.net Forums - View Profile: monjardin as entry number 8. :blink:

[ProgramWizard]

Generally, I find that people are attracted to a board that has a lot of history and a super strong community. They want to disscuss the topic at hand, but they also want to feel like they are apart of something. This place is a little too boring for a lot of people. Maybe we should hire people to act like idiots, ban them, and then whenever someone screws up, we say "at least you didn't pull a <insert name here>". That way, people will join so they can get in on the secrets. You'd be surprised how many of these people go on to contribute greatly to the board.

[eddie]

Every village does need a resident idiot. ;)