notyou2 wrote:It seems the new owners of CC want more traffic.
They are also declaring amnesty on many perma-banned members.
It's pretty obvious the forum rules and guidelines have been relaxed.
The next step is to reintroduce Flame Wars.
It starts by making the old posts accessible again.
The old posts are gone to the dustbin of history. I'm not even kidding.
The second problem is that Team CC thinks that Flame Wars should stay dead.
Which leads me to the point that I have always held, but recently been able to re-articulate:
Team CC directly killed CC.
Back in the Day, lackattack was the admin, there was Twill and Andy and wicked as mods, and then the mod squad, so Team CC totaled like 5-7 people for the first year.
When the tournaments forum was created, it had ONE moderator, in addition to the mod squad. Same with clans, the foundry etc.
As Team CC grew and grew everything was going great, the site was growing but lackattack became more and more distant from the site. He wasn't playing games, he stopped planning the events, he didn't post in the threads, he didn't comment on the suggestions or join the tournaments. Lackattack had a reasonable idea, and he did what thousands of game developers could only dream of - he got lucky and had a loyal community following.
Then, Team CC allowed lackattack to vanish. We enabled him to abandon all the parts of CC that make it great. So, the decline began.
The forum was also killed by the splintering of it. Most people read the forum by clicking through it in a browser. To view each subforum now takes dozens of clicks. To those who get it through newsfeed, it all comes in an easily digestible format, but for the rest the forum is lost. Team CC pushed most of the forum archetypes. In this way, we also contributed to the decline in a mechanical way.
Individuals in Team CC also caused a ruckus - full-blown fights across the forum, clan splits, favoritism, lobbying admin, calling Hasbro. We contributed to the decline of CC simply by creating a divide between the haves and the have-nots. I remember when Fircoal would log in once a year but he was a discussions mod for years after that. Same for nagerous. Did anyone notice safariguy5 leaving?
Then we have my love-hate object - the newsletter. It's great when there is a community to write about and who wants to read about it. Now, it only makes apparent how dead the site is. Since it is given to every member, everyone sees how much of a ghost the site is.
I am starting to think that the events I (mostly) plan and run are also contributing to the decline. We get a few last miles out of players before they realize that they have gotten everything out of CC they can. We further splinter the game selection process by taking up more of players' time with tournaments and events, and less with casual games.
The over-moderation of bygone years is already gone, but we (as Team CC members) need to focus on how to minimize our negative impacts on the site.
Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2014 3:12 pm
