I read about the Internet's 1% rule the other day and found it interesting:
In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
I've heard similar things about sites like Reddit where the vast majority of people just lurk and this got me to thinking: how does this apply to bots4? I did some simple command-line hacking on the server logs to get a rough idea of how many unique people visit the site and how many unique people are active on the game forums.
This command shows how many unique IP addresses visited the site in December 2013:
$ cut -d ' ' -f 1 201312*.log | sort -u | wc -l
6635
And this command shows how many unique IP addresses made POST requests on pages containing the substring "forum" (which is an approximation of how many unique IPs wrote on the forums):
$ grep POST 201312*.log | grep forum | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort -u | wc -l
546
This isn't a perfect measurement for a few reasons (for instance, IP addresses don't correspond exactly one-to-one with unique people, but it's a good approximation), but 546 / 6,635 = 8.2%. This is higher than the direct quote above, but if you read the Wikipedia article, it talks about content creators and content contributors, which tend to correspond to 1% and 9%, respectively.
So what's the takeaway? As an active forum member myself, I think it's easy to forget that there's a silent majority that plays this game and doesn't really communicate too broadly. There are a ton of familiar faces, but there's an order of magnitude more of unfamiliar faces. It would probably be beneficial to everyone for me to find ways to more easily solicit opinions from this silent majority, either directly (quick polls) or indirectly (usage metrics).
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Get even more creative than quick polls, let's get these people talking!
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Polls were a type if post that was requested at some point in the past I believe.
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There is a lot of rediculous post made in the forum, and i believe that some people just don't care to associate with all the silly comments being made. If the first thing they read in the forum is a stupid post then they don't want to bother with it. Believe it or not, some people don't have a sense of humor. Or maybe they don't really know enough about the game to reply to some of the comments. These anti-social people need to be made aware of the communication methods in the game. Somehow let them know what the forum is all about.
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Try doing a poll asking about people's posting / forum habits, and also add a reward of some kind to increase participation.
Free exp or something similar for people who complete the poll, and / or who post on the forum while the poll is running.
Can't think of anything else....
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dont yell at me ender but try a posting / star lottery for posters :o get more peopel active maybe it would.
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Gold trophy for makin a thread in the forum tht gets 10 replies. Also, would it be possible to somehow make where we can see how much playin time an ip has? Then we could reach out to them when We see a newish player online
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Sully, that is a great idea you have. +1. But all someone would have to do is reply to their own thread 10 times. Maybe it would have to be 10 replies from 10 different IP's.
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Gold trophy for makin a thread in the forum tht gets 10 replies.
No, easily abusable, makes the forum spammy instead of quality, thought out posts. Theres no point the forum being active if it is just people trying to get trophies (and I'll be the first to say I would be one of the spammers, I like trophies).
Also, would it be possible to somehow make where we can see how much playin time an ip has?
This would remove some of the mystery of who owns what bot, which would suck. Also, not only would it be inaccurate for people who's IP changes, but people might not want that data being shared. (And Ender probably doesn't log it already, so it would have to "start" now).
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Good points, I'll keep thinking :)
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Maybe just send a mass b-mail out with encouraging words for people to use the forum... Otherwise someone could keep a close eye on forum post and make a decision to who would get a trophy. Let Ender decide on the specifics on why specific players get the trophy. Maybe a 'Helper's' trophy and a 'Good Idea' trophy and so-forth. What you guys think?
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The best way to encourage people to use the forum is to have quality content and threads. Reddit mods don't have to bribe people into posting. Make threads that people want to contribute to
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Reddit mods don't have to bribe people into posting. Make threads that people want to contribute to
& what proportion of reddit readers post?
I post when I am comfortable in a community. So I either have to be confident enough to deal with haters or know that I'll not be ridiculed by the main player base.
The community can not do anything about individuals confidence, but they can support & nuture new players.
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In bots2 it took me maybe 3 years before I posted anything on the forum.
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I post when I am comfortable in a community. So I either have to be confident enough to deal with haters or know that I'll not be ridiculed by the main player base.
The community can not do anything about individuals confidence, but they can support & nuture new players.
Well said couldn't agree more
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I post without regards to caring what the community thinks. If you don't like what I have to say, Go Fuck Yourself.
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This thread went in an unintended direction. It wasn't meant to be about getting the silent majority to partcipate on the forums; it was just meant to be about an interesting statistic and, as an afterthought, acknowledging that relying solely on the forums for gauging reception of new ideas fails to take a large percentage of players into account. Not everyone's interested in doing the forum thing and that's fine.
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lol. Well now, isnt that a stinker. All those ideas and it doesn't even matter. haha.
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Well my thinking is tht trying to get more people on the forum IS the best way to get ideas/input from these people.
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I don't wanna derail the thread anymore though, that is a neat stat ender I didn't know tht
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Well my thinking is tht(sic) trying to get more people on the forum IS the best way to get ideas/input from these people.
My thinking on this is when a game gives the community a medium to express their views, and they stay quiet, then either they like the game as is or don't care enough to speak up.
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lol. Well now, isnt that a stinker. All those ideas and it doesn't even matter. haha.
That's why there is called a suggestions topic in the forums.
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Ender, would you go into more details about how direct polls and usage metrics work?
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I didn't give it much thought because I'm unlikely to work on it anytime soon, but an example of a quick poll could be something at the top of the page like a trophy notification that asks what you think of a new feature. An example of usage metrics would be more advanced tracking of new feature usage. Again though, don't read too much into this because it's not something I've thought about for more than a minute or two.
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makes the forum spammy instead of quality, thought out posts.
This made me laugh, not out loud, just in my head.
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I laughed in your head, too.
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If I decide not to lurk, I make posts like this.
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I haven't been around much, thus I haven't been on the forum much either. But I will say this. Ender you are one smart dude! Who would have thought about some Internet 1% rule, I wouldn't. It's very interesting though. Keep up the good work on Bots. Cheers...
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