General Decrease in Omnimaga Activity - What can we do?
DJ Omnimaga:
I guess that could do. Actually an idea for the current contest was to force people to create a topic about their contest project, but I think that rule was scrapped. I know the Omni CoT group already has some activity rules, although not as high as they were while I was still admin.
Jonius7:
I've only been back a bit more active (not heaps active like in March and April), and am shocked at just the drop in activity.
Technically we have many members but it looks like fewer and fewer are contributing some posts. Post increases in the more 'dedicated' members are not enough (i.e. it's better usually to have 50 members posting some each day rather than 5 mega posting spree members).
For me (I'm looking at the stats page much), just 7 post is enough for 2nd in the top 10 daily posters, 20 posts is enough for me to be 'securely' in the weekly top 10, and 29 for the month (1 1/2 weeks of October).
These comparisions might be weird, but they indicate a lot when you compare to even earlier in the year.
I like this post by DJ_O with many good suggestions on what to do.
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?topic=13173.msg241444#msg241444
DJ Omnimaga:
Yeah I noticed we still have a whole lot of members and a very decent amount of traffic (still pulling 20000+- hits everyday compared to 10000 in 2010) and the school rush still had over 100+ guests at a time like last year. I think what happens is that over the years, more people had internet for a while at home and got used to the fact that Google is their friend, along with forum search engines. Since Axe and the Nspire were both new, a lot of people needed to ask new question everytime. Today, most of those questions have been answered many times already so most new members can find everything they need without asking. There's also the whole novelty effect that the Nspire hacking, Lua and Axe Parser had which weared off over time, like xLIB and the 84+ back in the days. That means less posting.
On a good note: The July drop in activity happened at the same time as the Spam section was shut down, at a time where activity there was very high. If a forum admin ran a SQL query to calculate the monthly post count for 2012 but excluding spam, I wouldn't be surprised if Jan-June were pretty close to July-September.
Also I notice some days there are still a lot of active topics, which is good. There just seems to be fewer instances where one or two topic get about 40-50 replies in a day.
Just hoping it won't drop even more, though >.< (at least right now it's over the old board in general, where half of the month there were like 20-30 posts per day including spam)
Dingus:
I wonder if what we are seeing is like:
The ball game ended and all the fans left and went about their business doing other things. Meanwhile there are a few guys still sitting in the stands asking hey where is every one?
Is it game over? Sure seems like it.
willrandship:
Hmm...on that topic of the teams idea....
We should have randomly chosen teams, but each would contain a certain amount from different pools. As in, there would be a pool of users good at graphics, a pool good at the programming, map design, etc.
Also, what about having weekly code-offs? They would start at pre-defined times, and would have a simple challenge. The person can code it in any calc language, and there would be a scoring system.
Example (I'm coming up with it on the spot. Criticism is welcome. :P)
-100 Bonus points for turning it in first
4000 points for not working at all, can be decreased if, say, it half works.
1 point for each byte in the runtime file. This gives an advantage to Axe/Asm over BASIC/Grammer.
1 point for every frame/millisecond/whatever it takes to run, past the execution point. (pressing enter)
Asm programs should be run with Asm(prgmNAME), and Axe programs should be compiled so they can run the same way. This is because timing problems would result from running MirageOS/DoorsCS/Ion start methods.
There should be a website with a live-updating countdown method of some sort, so it shows the challenge to everyone at the same time regardless of refreshes.
Since they're weekly, there shouldn't be IRL prizes (money is expensive!) but maybe we should bring back the trophy system, but for this. Clicking on the trophy would take you to their zip in the file archives.
Oh, and the entries should be open source. We should have the community development skill increase as people see others' methods for running programs faster. These programs aren't going to be massive games or anything.
A few example challenges: [stuff] means replace with specifics.
* make a program that displays the result of [some (hard) math operation]
* make a program that can draw [3d, lots of grey, etc.]
* make a program that [does something] in an especially creative way.
One potential problem is the time delay between the different time zones we are in. I believe we have 3 separate general regions to deal with (americas, europe, eastern asia) and I have a few thoughts on that as well.
* Have the start base on local time, so everyone starts at 5:00 PM in their area.
* Ignore the problem, and make the challenges hard enough that it's negligible. (ie they take 3-4 days)
* Cycle through starting times, so everyone gets a head start at some point.