| . | Being a part of TSF for so long makes a person wonder what causes the ups and downs of a community, what can be done to improve the good community feeling and what could be a downer. So here it is, my analysis of what creates good feeling at The Site Fights. ;)
Things that makes TSF successful: - Community spirit. What keeps people going despite getting nowhere in competition? The community spirit! The feeling of making friends and being part of something positive. - Volounteers. Being team leaders and all sorts all require volounteers, the entire site rests on volounteers, and it's the enspirited enthusiastic responsible volounteers that have a huge impact creating an atmosphere where people want to be. - Competition that's not just about winning. The spirit of the fights, in other words.. Even when you lose there's things to look forward to. - Events, adoptions, hunts, etc.. Something to do for fun. :) Things that could improve TSF: - Web 2.0 thinking. If I get this right, TSF was founded during a more Web 1.0 kind of time, which was when sites were focused on providing something for the fairly passive viewer, being the entertainment center for someone who needs to be entertained. Nowadays that's just not enough and the theme of the now is that the users want to be creators, interactive, influencing, changing, making.. so basically in ways it's possible it'd be good to give people more ways of being interactive instead of doing events for entertainment. The question of course becomes, *how* could the site be more interactive.. because obviously if you want to interact more you can just join the faeries and such. That requires quite a comittment, though, so something simpler and faster. - Less events per month. I said this when the plan to do this was first announced and I say it again - if you give people LOADS of things to do, or even just many things to do, every month, then the VALUE of doing hunts and events go down. When there was just one or two TSF-wide hunts per year it was a huge important event, now it can be hard to get people interested enough. When people know that the same events will be there the next month and the month after that, until infinity, then it becomes less important to participate now - if ever. - More connecting between staff, especially high staff, and other people. I know it takes a *lot* of work to keep a group / site running and everyone
who works on things can't be chatty, but personally I feel there's a bit of a gap between the staff as far as communication goes (not counting team staff of the team you're fighting on) and everyone else. A closer connection between everyone would eliminate some drama that could come from people who feel they're too far away from the staff to be heard. I'm not talking about reaching people, as it's easy enough to email people, I'm thinking more in the ways of connecting with people and establishing that they're not some ghosts in the computers, far away from everything the rest of us are doing.
Things are good, man.. :) As far as the voting system goes, it's one of many types and I find it's a good thing that not every competition has the same system. I don't mind the way votes are counted now, it just means you won't know the exact amount of votes you're getting. It has its advantages and disadvantages. Now I hope some silly people don't think this means I have something against TSF. :P I'm stricktly against keeping quiet any thoughts about change just to "not upset people" who feel threatened by ideas that could disturb their vision of things. This isn't a call for change, this is just my thoughts about it, and I feel it's very important to share thoughts and opinions openly. If we cannot say what we think, then surely it's not the TSF I know and love! Without communication we never get anywhere and community spirit suffers. So yay for open communication! :D The End. ;)
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