Wow this site seems dead. Might need to liven this up.

[Kuribo]

Can anyone think of a good reason to keep level judges at all? I'm pretty sure it just pointlessly overcomplicates things. Get rid of the rank, and get rid of the subforums for Pretty Good, Average, etc. Just let users rate the levels themselves instead of having an arbitrary group of people as the arbiters of quality level design.

[aero]

Don't go over board. The levels should be separated to distinguish the good from the bad so people who are playing levels know what to expect.

Level Judges are pretty much obsolete though and are really only useful for moving topics around. b-but muh color coded review with arbitrary 10-score metrics and made up design categories

[Kuribo]

I'm sure there are simpler ways to distinguish levels by quality without having four different subforums. Maybe there's an extension or something for our forum software that does this; I've seen a lot of forums that let you give a thread a star rating, and you can see the average user rating at a glance without having to click on the thread. Something like that is definitely preferable to the current system imo.

[Emral]

The issue is that almost no one cares to download, play and give constructive feedback on a level. I think a 5-Star rating is a good way to make scores fairer and more accurate, but I think there needs to be a way to make sure the ratings are tied to constructive feedback. People who just look at the obligatory screenshot and say "i r8 8/8 5 stars" aren't helping anyone and making the system useless.

[aero]

People do that now. Ditch the "Level Judge master race reviewers" meme and let it be known that regular users can leave input that effects where the level is moved to. It encourages more people to take part in reviewing, offsets your work load more so than it already is with the Casual forum, and satisfies the level maker with faster response times. The levels forum right now looks like what the introductions forum used to look like, and making it more community involved instead of limited to a single group can really change that and bring in some form or another of discussion. Right now reviews have to run through you guys, or you guys have to go out and review yourselves for a level to be moved. I think it would be much better (and constructive!) if a consensus was reached by regular posters as well as you guys on the quality of a level rather than going by 10-scores and making up categories as it is done now. To put it simply, treat levels like normal topics and let the community's judgement emerge from discussion of the level for you guys to move.

[underFlo]

I mean the problem is that a lot of community members aren't the greatest reviewers, as you can see from some unofficial contests. Of course you might say that it balances out, but a lot of people are probably gonna get heavily influenced by the "nonlinear levels custom GFX master race" meme. Additionally, if everyone can review the level, there's even less incentive for people to review a level (after the initial hype phase) because someone else could just do it.

And as Enjl said, decent reviews aren't guaranteed, so we'd need a user group to make sure those reviews are acceptable, and we'd be where we started.

[aero]

The community doesn't have to be good reviewers, and I'm not suggesting we just let everyone give a traditional review of the level and then it's done. What I'm trying to get at here is having people discuss the level such as pointing out what's good and what's bad, what needs to be improved and what was done right, then letting people interact just like in a normal topic where there can be agreements and disagreements about each others assessment of the level. This gets rid of the biases by not letting any one person be able to say "nonlinear levels custom GFX master race" since the opinion would be subject to scrutiny of people that think linear and vanilla levels can be decent. Furthermore it moves away from 10-scores which are just a mask of objectivity when it's all just subjective feelings behind the scenes making the whole thing arbitrary. The subjective and biased garbage is cleared out and you're left with a general attitude of thread which would match up quite well with the connotations of the level category names.

By the way I don't see where the disincentive would come from letting everyone be able to interact. There's no incentive to even post a level right now because when it is, it might get a few replies over the course of a month and then finally be moved; switching to a discussion based system would immediately solve this. The irony is that when an LJ gets their promotion they get an initial hype phase and then really slow down to cause the very situation we're discussing.

[Zipper]

There's no incentive to even post a level right now because when it is, it might get a few replies over the course of a month and then finally be moved; switching to a discussion based system would immediately solve this. The irony is that when an LJ gets their promotion they get an initial hype phase and then really slow down to cause the very situation we're discussing.

This is something that's been lingering on the back of my mind as well. The only reason to post a level right now is to wait a few weeks for a level judge to get active, and see it moved to one of the subforums, where it rots for good. There is almost NO additional input from other members from what I've noticed, and if there is, it's a review that's...uh...how do I say it...made to look "as official as possible". I don't know how right I am on this, but it looks like there seems to be a general aversion to ANY sort of discussion that's not a full fledged "official(TM)" review.

[Mable]

I actually tried to do reviews by pointing out what is good, what is bad and what could be improved.
Though the some of the level judges and staff didn't really think they good since my english isn't that great for it.

[FireyPaperMario]

The forums isn't really dead, we all were just very busy, no offense.

[Mable]

we all were just very busy, no offense. :mrgreen:

what why should this be offensive

[lighthouse64]

I doubt the site is dead, even the fanfiction and rp area which certainly doesn't have much activity still has some.

[aero]

I doubt the site is dead, even the fanfiction and rp area which certainly doesn't have much activity still has some.

That's not a good metric to judge how alive the site is. Half of the users here have never posted and about half of those are spam accounts. The IRC is basically dead with it basically being a join/quit log, and it's summer so kids should be off school now but they're not here anymore. A bunch of people are leaving because they can't stand this place, and the rest keep to a few topics.

[Kuribo]

Summer break generally doesn't start until June, I thought. If anything, at the end of the school year, it makes sense to see lower activity because of finals and whatnot.

[aero]

It's the end of May and early June, so basically right now. There should at the very least be more than nothing at all.

[Yoshi021]

Half of the users here have never posted

I noticed that they were banned users with 0 posts. How do you get banned without even posting anything?

[PixelPest]

Half of the users here have never posted

I noticed that they were banned users with 0 posts. How do you get banned without even posting anything?

Because you post something really bad and the staff deletes it or you just do bad things on the chat and never actually post on the forums; at least those are my best guesses. Also duplicate accounts

[aero]

Half of the users here have never posted

I noticed that they were banned users with 0 posts. How do you get banned without even posting anything?

Deleted posts, and preemptive bans because it's easy to tell if someone is a spammer.

[Yoshi021]

That makes sense.

[Kuribo]

Having a lot of registered users with zero posts is also not that unusual. It's at least been the case for all the forums I've frequented. It doesn't say much about the forum's activity.