UEMB Town Hall 2023

[Raptorpat 11138]

We're going to open up a thread just to kind of open the door and discuss what people like, don't like, or want to see happen here.

With @scoobdog's ASMB Survivor game complete, we'll be looking to archive the ASMB 20th Anniversary event board in the near future. Props to everyone who participated in the anniversary event, and in particular everyone who popped in to reconnect with the community. June was a pretty great month here - just a refreshing combination of nostalgia, returning faces, and new energy. Anyone who wants to get one last word in should jump over before it closes shop. Some of the threads may be ported out to live boards and we'll probably anchor some sort of shout-out thread in this folder for anyone who missed that boat but still wants to say hi or reintroduce themselves within that ASMB context.

But anyways - moving forward! I'm going to open the floor. Setting aside the anniversary itself, we're about a year into the last big site revamp. So how do you feel about UEMB? Where do you think we succeed, and where do we fall short? What could we do better? What should our "voice" and direction be? 

(I'll add some of my own thoughts in a follow-up reply, once I finish thinking them up and then type them with my fingers.)

[[classic swim] 708]

UE rightfully became my #1 favorite spot on the web. So for me, not many complaints whatsoever.

Thanks for the heads up on the Reunion tab. I know everyone’s ready to move on but it really has been awesome.

[André Toulon 23322]

Post tags

*Throws self out of thread*

....in retrospect...I guess I don't have a use for them now.

[discolé monade 19457]

i still think you should invite all the BOS (except the illegal doers) and only let them in TD. make it a REAL thunderdome experience. 

j/k

  

 

 

[The_annoying_one 5806]

Create a special board for the onslaught of bots we’ve been getting, confine them all to it, and see what happens.

You could even put a webcam feed of it on the front page like the ASMB had at one point. That would surely bring in more traffic.

[helpme 12141]

14 hours ago, The_annoying_one said:

You could even put a webcam feed of it on the front page like the ASMB had at one point. That would surely bring in more traffic.

Now this I do like

[Doom Metal Alchemist 8948]

So since it was possible to have rectangular/square avatars in the anniversary board.... How about making it site wide? I know circle avatars are the norm now but they still fucking suck.

[André Toulon 23322]

20 minutes ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

So since it was possible to have rectangular/square avatars in the anniversary board.... How about making it site wide? I know circle avatars are the norm now but they still fucking suck.

....that actually bothers you?

[Doom Metal Alchemist 8948]

4 minutes ago, André Toulon said:

....that actually bothers you?

Yes because once great avatars get ruined by auto cropping.

[André Toulon 23322]

2 minutes ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

Yes because once great avatars get ruined by auto cropping.

I would say something about being stuck in the past but I'm 100% sure it's the most hypocritical thing I could say.

[[classic swim] 708]

Now that I think about it, an audio message component for posts would be neat.

[scoobdog 25160]

3 hours ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

So since it was possible to have rectangular/square avatars in the anniversary board.... How about making it site wide? I know circle avatars are the norm now but they still fucking suck.

I actually prefer the circular avatars.

[Doom Metal Alchemist 8948]

1 hour ago, scoobdog said:

I actually prefer the circular avatars.

Why?

[André Toulon 23322]

1 minute ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

Why?

Why do you like square ones?

I honestly don't care either way but didn't even notice they were square in that folder. Looking at it now, it looks kinda lame to me but it's not really a big deal either way 

[scoobdog 25160]

10 minutes ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

Why?

It's less obtrusive than the square ones.  You're not supposes to notice avatars other than as a quick way to see who is posting what.  The more space they take, the more cluttered the page looks and feels.

[Doom Metal Alchemist 8948]

6 minutes ago, André Toulon said:

Why do you like square ones?

I honestly don't care either way but didn't even notice they were square in that folder. Looking at it now, it looks kinda lame to me but it's not really a big deal either way 

You use an image for an avatar and it crops out the corners so it fits in the circle. It's showing the picture incomplete. And the only way to get it all in is to make it smaller. These bubbles are small enough as it is.

[SheemaGorath 88]

I dig it here whenever I remember to come here. No problems here! 

[scoobdog 25160]

This thread is dead.

Did anyone notice the Survivor game was going on?

[The_annoying_one 5806]

12 minutes ago, scoobdog said:

This thread is dead.

Did anyone notice the Survivor game was going on?

That’s still a sore subject. 

[[classic swim] 708]

Round Two 4 Life.

[Raptorpat 11138]

1 hour ago, scoobdog said:

This thread is dead.

I have thoughts but I need to sit and type them and I got distracted by life. But once I sit down I'll type something out and draw more attention to the 

On 8/17/2023 at 8:54 AM, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

So since it was possible to have rectangular/square avatars in the anniversary board.... How about making it site wide? I know circle avatars are the norm now but they still fucking suck.

If you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, there should be a little button that says "Theme" that you can use to individually toggle from the default format to the ASMB one.

If it makes sense to make more themes we can do that but making the one we did was a massive pain in the ass v because I'm really dumb.

[The_annoying_one 5806]

1 minute ago, Raptorpat said:

If you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, there should be a little button that says "Theme" that you can use to individually toggle from the default format to the ASMB one.

I’ve been a member here for nearly two years and I never knew this.

Thanks, Pat!

[Raptorpat 11138]

There was the original software default theme and we pretty much immediately flipped it to the UEMB default, and until now that was it so there was no real reason to know.

[Raptorpat 11138]

I think the 20th anniversary board was pretty neat, just an absolute refreshing blast of nostalgia and old faces popping in to say hi or reintegrate into that message board life. It was just a great vibe all around. A big thank you to all the volunteers that helped, and thank you to everyone who stopped in and joined the conversation. Particular shoutouts off the top of my head to @LoverDemon for dropping in with that absolute OG energy, to @romana for raising outside awareness, and to @eklipse just I think for being a wonderful human being (which in retrospect has nothing to do with the event but shut up). Also - major props to @scoobdog for hosting the ASMB Survivor game and congrats to @discolé monade for taking home the prize! We will be archiving the event folder soon, but if anyone has ideas on how to carry that vibe onward, we're all ears.

Beyond the anniversary event, it's worth noting that it's been about a year since we did the site reset. From my perspective, I think it totally shifted the tone of the site in a positive manner. To the extent that things slowed down at that point, it slowed down due to the lack of drama. Which I think is an inherently positive trade and the shift in vibe genuinely made it a more pleasant user experience (at least from my own perspective). Like merging Toonami/[adult swim] and empowering the new helpers just made sense from a content perspective, and I think there is a wider range of content there now than a year ago to show for it. I'd like to make a better emphasis externally to highlight that area of the site, because I do believe it's an anchor to draw people in from elsewhere.

And I really liked divorcing CE/GD from the old paradigm and making them more neutral environments. Like I was always a current events poster but the old Rants was genuinely terrible by the end, because the folder in concept was a quarantine for terrible attitudes and political arguments, so it was just geared up to be purposely miserable from the start. Shoutouts to @matrixman124, @Jman, @tsar4, and probably a few more who just really nailed what the new tone of Current Events and even legacy folders should be from the start. And frankly GD really needed the folder consolidation to be more of a genuine catch-all "water cooler" folder, instead of the IB-Lite that FFA had turned into because of how many other topical folders used to exist. I think there may be things in CE that might be more GD-appropriate, and I'd bet we have too many "post your thoughts on X" megathreads that probably shortcut fuller content/conversation, and maybe we'll recalibrate to try to balance it out, idk. But I think the foundation of it all was a good base to grow out from as folks trickle in and decide whether its worth sticking around. Honestly I want to keep namedropping people for their contributions and and energy and I like have a genuine mental list but I don't want to leave folks out and it wasn't even the point of this post.

 

But moving forward, we don't really have any magical dates or landmarks to keep our eyes to and I think it's worth talking about where to go from here. A lot of our energy and collective persona is built into our cloak of ASMB nostalgia - and I think that's important! But I think we're also at a point where it's worth maybe looking forward and trying to go beyond that. We've seen a fair few "new" faces over 2023 and the new energy people bring in is what sustains us and makes it all worthwhile. I'm not saying we're looking for a hail mary strategy to open the floodgates, but I think it's important that we're positioned where people within a reasonably scaled niche can both see us and want give us a shot when they see us (whether to add our tab to their list of communities or because they're quitting ubiquitous social media). And to Sheem's comment:

On 8/18/2023 at 9:03 PM, SheemaGorath said:

I dig it here whenever I remember to come here. No problems here! 

I also want to figure out if there are ways to get existing folks to engage more often and frankly not forget we exist. Obviously we're not doing push notifications and we send out an eblast probably twice a year at most. Like for example I see a lot of ASMB people complaining about facebook/mainstream social media but needing it purely to keep in touch with their e-friends, and I'm like "you guys, UEMB is both off the grid and right here, and we even have both profile/club posting if you don't want to do the whole message board thing" so obviously there's a lot of room for our external improvement in that regard.

 

I'm definitely rambling at this point, so I'll pause and let some of what I wrote hang out there before I come back. I would have been more organized in my thoughts if I had finished getting them out before I hit the brick burnout wall a month ago, so y'all just gotta deal with my scattered thoughts sorry not sorry.

[matrixman124 1366]

I really should start posting here again lol

Thanks for the shout-out! ❤️

[tsar4 11699]

There's one shoutout missing.  Thank you for all you do Raptorpat!

[Raptorpat 11138]

Thanks tsar, but my real objective though is kinda more to spin the future out to everyone. The collective. The hivemind.

[Raptorpat 11138]

On 9/12/2023 at 4:28 PM, Raptorpat said:

I also want to figure out if there are ways to get existing folks to engage more often and frankly not forget we exist.

On 9/12/2023 at 4:49 PM, matrixman124 said:

I really should start posting here again lol

Thanks for the shout-out! ❤️

lol that wasn't exactly the solution i was looking for BUT I'LL TAKE IT

[Poofy 461]

the horror folder is still in archive mode and theres hella halloween decorations up outside

[Raptorpat 11138]

Unofficial so just mentioning it here and not making a formal announcement yet, but we may be doing our big software/security update this weekend. Slight possibility that downtime cuts into toonami hours but not sure yet.

If it goes through, we will probably shut down the ASMB anniversary board at that time and revert any lingering changes like mod rank shenanigans.

Security update should resolve this horrible botspam we deal with on a daily basis.

[scoobdog 25160]

I love the bots.

[André Toulon 23322]

9 hours ago, scoobdog said:

I love the bots.

I really wasn't going to say anything.....but it's a small part of my fun

[scoobdog 25160]

4 hours ago, André Toulon said:

I really wasn't going to say anything.....but it's a small part of my fun

They’re actually somewhat entertaining.  Chalk it up to things AI makes better.

[Raptorpat 11138]

this is *just* today so far

[Doom Metal Alchemist 8948]

22 hours ago, scoobdog said:

I love the bots.

The sex doll one was amusing but generally I find them real annoying. I don't think I've seen it on this board, but I've been on boards where one bot will flood the entire first page with spam in the span of less than an hour, and just keep doing it every day.

[cyberbully 15201]

43 minutes ago, Doom Metal Alchemist said:

The sex doll one was amusing but generally I find them real annoying. I don't think I've seen it on this board, but I've been on boards where one bot will flood the entire first page with spam in the span of less than an hour, and just keep doing it every day.

We have users for that.