Refocusing the Community Work
Some community-based changes are being made!! Here's the article off the official site:
Refocusing the Community Work 20 January, 2003 Thomas Johnsen After a thorough evaluation of our community work, where the wish to focus a lot more on the Anarchy Online community sites was at the core, we have decided to do some major changes to the Anarchy Online bulletin board. About half the forums will be closed on 22 January 2003, greatly reducing our time spent on administration and moderation, and making us able to focus the work elsewhere. Since the Funcom Community Team started up in August 2001, it has gone through a lot of changes, both in tasks and personnel. We started out with three people, working with the official Anarchy Online bulletin board, the myriad of large and small AO community sites, and - of course - huge piles of e-mails. Since then we've had several people moving in and out of the team, and perhaps unfortunately, mostly out. Currently it's a one man team, but working closer than ever with the designers and coders makes up for that to a large degree. We have tried different ways of covering the community needs as well as possible. The AO community sites (often just called "fan sites") have gotten varying attention over the 17 months the team has been operating. The bulletin board has gone through several rounds of both major and minor changes, and we have added the Funcom IRC server to the list of community gathering places. Lately, an evaluation has been done on how to best satisfy the community's needs, and one of the most important wishes has been to give more back to those dedicating a lot of their time to run AO community sites. We want more life on those sites, and to be more present there ourselves, as we feel that's something the people working together on the sites deserve. Lately we've agreed on several regular events with the major sites, and you might have noticed that some already have regular rounds of questions and answers with us. At the same time, it's always a question of resources, i.e. time. Learning from having moved the day-to-day operation of our IRC server to volunteers, we looked into what tasks we can leave to others, while concentrating on what basically only we can do. In this process one task presented itself as the one demanding a lot of time - now as always - and that was maintaining the bulletin board. Maintaining the bulletin board is a lot of work, and even though we have volunteer moderators helping out, this is taking up many hours every week. Hours that we feel could better be spent on more rewarding work for the community. But closing the bulletin board down was not seen as a viable option. Instead we took a close look at each forum to see whether it was absolutely needed to be run by us, or could be handled by others. Those we found possible to hand over to others, we will close for new posts, and leave to the AO community sites to cover. Spreading the forum activity to several sites does not mean we will stop reading what people post. We will just read it without at the same time having to think about whether the post is on topic, in the correct forum, using proper language, etc. Funcom employees already frequent other bulletin boards, and we're going to continue with that, and hope to increase the activity too. All in all, we are sure this will lead to more activity on the AO community sites, both from us and the rest of the community, which is something we all owe to the people behind those sites. It will free up more time for other community work, both for the team and the volunteers who help out. And - in fact - it will allow those who post on the forums more freedom, as we simply have to put some restrictions on an official bulletin board that other bulletin boards might not want - or need. Which forums will remain? The forums we'd like to keep are:
Those most needed by new players, namely the Beginners' Corner and the two technical help forums.
One official forum for posting community updates; Community Corner.
One forum for dealing with the test dimension; we will merge the current two into one.
The forums concerning our feedback program Professionals; hence we're keeping all twelve profession forums.
Two extremely active forums which we would like to see very good alternatives for before we close them down; the Atlantean and Rimor Exchange forums.
The rest will be closed for new posts, and archived. No posts will be removed, and at request some will be moved to the still open forums, if appropriate.
What about e.g. suggestions and bugs?
Bugs should be sent to bugs@anarchy-online.com, and suggestions to feedback@anarchy-online.com, together with all kinds of feedback. We also know some AO community sites have suggestion forums, and will frequent those for picking up great ideas, and also expect to have some especially popular ones forwarded to us by the sites.
Where do we find other forums?
For the English speaking community we would especially like to recommend the bulletin boards at these endorsed sites
Anarchy Online Stratics
AO Basher
AO Vault
In addition, you might want to take some time to browse through the site listing on the official AO site, as bulletin boards can develop different personalities, and finding the one that suits you best is often worth the extra effort.
When will we see results?
Hopefully you have noticed some of them already, as lately we have worked with the AO community sites to keep them more updated with news from us. As mentioned earlier, some also have regular questions which we answer, and I can mention dev chats and competitions as other things you'll see soon. In addition we've spent more time on the Professionals program, to ensure designer updates to major profession concerns, and we have an idea or two more ready too.
I'm confident that we'll see a more thriving community through this, one which will continue to grow and be both diverse and close-knit. The official Anarchy Online bulletin board will continue to be a gathering place for this community, together with the AO community sites and their bulletin boards, and both our own and others' IRC servers. And of course, we'll see each other on Rubi-Ka.
Discuss this article here.
Best regards,
Thomas "Cz" Johnsen,
Funcom Community Manager
Quite an eyeful, but this was long overdue. The people at Funcom are really working hard to make AO what it needs to be to survive in the marketplace today. -Kenti
Refocusing the Community Work 20 January, 2003 Thomas Johnsen After a thorough evaluation of our community work, where the wish to focus a lot more on the Anarchy Online community sites was at the core, we have decided to do some major changes to the Anarchy Online bulletin board. About half the forums will be closed on 22 January 2003, greatly reducing our time spent on administration and moderation, and making us able to focus the work elsewhere. Since the Funcom Community Team started up in August 2001, it has gone through a lot of changes, both in tasks and personnel. We started out with three people, working with the official Anarchy Online bulletin board, the myriad of large and small AO community sites, and - of course - huge piles of e-mails. Since then we've had several people moving in and out of the team, and perhaps unfortunately, mostly out. Currently it's a one man team, but working closer than ever with the designers and coders makes up for that to a large degree. We have tried different ways of covering the community needs as well as possible. The AO community sites (often just called "fan sites") have gotten varying attention over the 17 months the team has been operating. The bulletin board has gone through several rounds of both major and minor changes, and we have added the Funcom IRC server to the list of community gathering places. Lately, an evaluation has been done on how to best satisfy the community's needs, and one of the most important wishes has been to give more back to those dedicating a lot of their time to run AO community sites. We want more life on those sites, and to be more present there ourselves, as we feel that's something the people working together on the sites deserve. Lately we've agreed on several regular events with the major sites, and you might have noticed that some already have regular rounds of questions and answers with us. At the same time, it's always a question of resources, i.e. time. Learning from having moved the day-to-day operation of our IRC server to volunteers, we looked into what tasks we can leave to others, while concentrating on what basically only we can do. In this process one task presented itself as the one demanding a lot of time - now as always - and that was maintaining the bulletin board. Maintaining the bulletin board is a lot of work, and even though we have volunteer moderators helping out, this is taking up many hours every week. Hours that we feel could better be spent on more rewarding work for the community. But closing the bulletin board down was not seen as a viable option. Instead we took a close look at each forum to see whether it was absolutely needed to be run by us, or could be handled by others. Those we found possible to hand over to others, we will close for new posts, and leave to the AO community sites to cover. Spreading the forum activity to several sites does not mean we will stop reading what people post. We will just read it without at the same time having to think about whether the post is on topic, in the correct forum, using proper language, etc. Funcom employees already frequent other bulletin boards, and we're going to continue with that, and hope to increase the activity too. All in all, we are sure this will lead to more activity on the AO community sites, both from us and the rest of the community, which is something we all owe to the people behind those sites. It will free up more time for other community work, both for the team and the volunteers who help out. And - in fact - it will allow those who post on the forums more freedom, as we simply have to put some restrictions on an official bulletin board that other bulletin boards might not want - or need. Which forums will remain? The forums we'd like to keep are:
Quite an eyeful, but this was long overdue. The people at Funcom are really working hard to make AO what it needs to be to survive in the marketplace today. -Kenti
Tags: AnarchyOnline, News