Comments on: How to get people to read bulletin boards

By: A holiday, a holiday, the first one of the year! Best of 2009. « Welcome to Spinksville!

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:07:17 +0000

[...] How to get people to read bulletin boards [...]

By: Mesar

Mesar — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:13:07 +0000

@ Spinks

Thanks for this piece. I actually *learnt* something from it

@ Ravious

Problem is with compulsory posting schemes is that people who play the forum game well excel, rather that people who play your game well. I was part of a compulsory posting pre-beta guild and it tended to promote spam posters and trollers rather than good guild members. When it came time to play with these guys I couldn’t stand the amount of negativity they promoted and left the guild within a week or two. A couple of weeks after that the guild dissolved – *even though we’d been playing the forum game extremely well for a year up to that point*

By: /AFK – July 19 « Bio Break

/AFK – July 19 « Bio Break — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:27:48 +0000

[...] I agree with Spinks – guild bulletin boards/forums are rarely if ever read by me, and I’m kinda annoyed when they try to make me. [...]

By: Ferrel

Ferrel — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:57:37 +0000

When I was leading Iniquity it was nightmarish to get our members to read our boards even though -all- of our important information was there.

Our raid schedule, leadership announcements and recruit tracking was all based on the forums and we still had members that just wouldn’t check.

Ultimately I had to use the force option. Our MotD never gave information other than “check the boards.” Once people started missing raids and not getting their points the learned to check.

We still had a huge disinterest in the recruitment threads though. I would laugh when someone would be upset about someone making full member. I’d ask them, “If you felt so strongly about that, why didn’t you put a negative comment on their thread?” They would, of course, just fall silent.

Our boards are still pretty busy though. People are good about checking them. We don’t have all the fun activity but they do check.

By: theerivs

theerivs — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:13:12 +0000

My guild boards are like a ghost town, though lately my guild is a ghost town too.

By: motstandet

motstandet — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:19:14 +0000

That’s a pretty clever way to do things, Gevlon. It’s like a secret password. Players like secrets.

By: unwize

unwize — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:29:09 +0000

@Ravious

That’s pretty much how my LotRO guild does things, and it seems to work quite well.

By: Gevlon

Gevlon — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:45:39 +0000

I’ve heard an effective method for this. GM wrote on bboards: “everyone please send me a whisp “black cats take loot”".

Before the raid he wrote in /rw “whisper it now”

Of course lot of people wrote “whisper what” or “wtf lol”.

Those who did not whispered “black cats take loot” were demoted to trial and did not get loot in the next two weeks.

By: Ravious

Ravious — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:30:08 +0000

My GW guild has an interesting way of focusing our guild forum. Our recruitment is through the guild forum (like many guilds) except that in order to pass stage 1, the recruitee has to basically show people he or she is a decent human being via the forums. So the recruitee must actively post. It gets the gears moving a little better for later on.

We also have an arcade that is linked via the forums for people that don’t want to be at work.