A few observations to answer your rants...
Theres only about 20-30 ppl from my guild still interested and they monitor the progress. It's not lack of faith in the project, its lack of communication and faith in the community. With little updates directed at the community and everyone being pushed to IRC and than being banned for little to no reason, I understand 100% if people dont want to put up with the moderator's BS.
It's like this, you put 8K people in a little area expecting something they want...say food. And you throw a few scraps at them every once in a while, just to keep them alive. After so long with not seeing progress and getting the silent treatment from the people they look up to, people become disappointed, tired, irritable, lose faith and most importantly are easily pissed off.
Forum mods are supposed to lead the forum community, not kill it. I'm not pointing any fingers or putting any names out there, but a project like this with so much anticipation, will receive a lot of dumb and irritating posts and responses. You can continue to piss people off by banning, flaming and then kindly closing the thread, or you can just ignore them and let the other community members take care of holding the newb's hand, than kindly close their topic.
Yes, it gets old, yes it pisses everyone off, but take some anger management classes and let other community members help with crowd control.
As far as the IRC banwagon, put a limit on that ****. If your going to ban someone, make sure its for a good reason, and use it as a punishment system. Like 1st offenders get a 1-week ban (or something non absolute). You keep pushing the community to IRC and than you ban them for stupid ****, than you complain because you do not get as many people on IRC as you want. This is stupid, it's like shooting someone for trying to eat that scrap of food you just threw to 8K people.
To solve all of the installation questions, has anyone thought of grabbing a fraps movie of a full installation, instead of people trying to follow the nuclear instructions that people have posted and that the forums decided to devour?
How about some people willing to put their IM names in a sticky for the support page in case people are having problems? They can IM or mail someone instead of posting, getting flamed and than ultimately getting banned.
How about a few different rooms in ventrillo or teamspeak for support or general discussions? The point is, support is very poorly implemented here, and people need other means to contact the community than IRC and the forums since it has been proven that if you need help installing it, the people here feel you dont deserve to be part of the community.
Thats the message that's being sent, and that covers most of why you do not get 'participation' from your community. It's been turned into a dictatorship, and people wont put up with it. This is why sites like truegalaxies and spraticnet have a much friendlier atmosphere and more community participation.
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