What's Been Happening To Gamerenders.com?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by ArchPriest, Sep 23, 2008.

  1. ArchPriest

    ArchPriest Well-Known Member

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    Hey guys,

    I was a huge GR fan for a very long time. Unfortunately some things came up that took me away form here, but now I am back. I remembered back in the day how the "peak" times would garner huge website lag and lots of page load errors. I had to re-write many-a-post back then. I have only been back for a few day and today has been pretty nasty about the Page Load errors, as it just seems like things are running a bit slow due to load. Since The member numbers here goes past 200,000, I wasn't surprised.

    So I decided to take a look at GRs rating on a few Domain rating sites, just to see how things were looking compared to the past. How much bigger it has gotten since I was here almost 2 years ago. I was absolutely DUMBFOUNDED when I got the results.

    Take a look at the Alexa rankings and traffic for GameRenders.Com

    [​IMG]

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    And let's look at the RANK... Looks like in April, GR was rated in the top 25000! Now WAY down past that!
    [​IMG]


    Now I am not trying to put this site down. I am posting this because I am trying to figure out what happened in April that peaked interest, and what has happened since then that has killed it. In an internet obsessed world, being in the top 25000 is a big deal for this site.

    Trying to figure out why people have strayed, or don't visit as often, I am forced to face my own past experience here...

    If you will once again look at the provided link HERE you will notice the following:
    Speed: Very Slow (99% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 12.6 Seconds

    Perhaps the slow load times have been keeping people from coming here? I know it's a graphics site and lots of larger load times happen due to the content here, but perhaps we can get some donations going for better hosting or something?

    Just my 2 cents,
    -Priest
     
  2. Majin

    Majin Senior Member

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    Kovan 9/11'd it.
     
  3. Kaine

    Kaine Well-Known Member

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    probably the massive amount of flaming and -----throwing + the april fools possibly, roflrofl.
     
  4. ArchPriest

    ArchPriest Well-Known Member

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    Who is Kovan, and what do you mean? (I get what 9/11'd means, just not sure as to what exactly he did) Apologies if I missed something obvious, I have been away a few years.

    Last time I was on the site, the mods were pretty quick to stop the flaming and bickering amongst people. Disputes about rights were quickly stopped and people who continually abused the rules were done away with for good. Is this no longer the case?

    LoL
     
  5. Majin

    Majin Senior Member

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    Kovan is a middle eastern man, need i say more?
     
  6. steez

    steez Banned from GR

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    all kovan
     
  7. Greasy Pete

    Greasy Pete Senior Member

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    these comments coupled with a strong viral mob-mentality, dumb rules, corruption, the breaking of rules and a lack of a general sense of value has effectively crippled this website to its knees.
     
  8. ArchPriest

    ArchPriest Well-Known Member

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    I See.

    As I read around the site I can see some of what you're saying.

    As a 3 year member with 8000+ posts, how do you feel about that?

    What do you think can be done?

    BTW: I enjoyed flipping through your DA gallery, but what is with the campaigning quote? :D
     
  9. dementia

    dementia Well-Known Member

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    Don't take anything Greasy Pete says with any form of factual or intelligent basis, look at his other posts to see what I mean.

    Shortly before Llamaman sold the site to Shaggy we started to experience mass amounts of down time, after Shaggy took over he continually has moved to stronger and bigger servers which should *easily* be able to support GR's database and yet he down time remains. It is in the coding, and the coding job Llamaman and Big_Dave did was, sorry to say, but extremely jumbled and nearly impossible to rectify. On GR v4 we are doing a 'from scratch' installation of all the files, including MySQL variables to rectify the issue and fix the faulty code causing the massive MySQL down time. This alone has contributed to mass amounts of inactivity.

    The staff have gotten a tad bit tougher here than when Llamaman and Big_Dave were admins. Very few new rules have been made since they left, but since they have left we have come up with a system where everyone's punishments should be consistent (ie, first time rippers are generally banned, where its normally a 3 or 5 strike rule on a single rule set before we ban). We added in, however, the ability for you to request an unban and state your case 3 months later to help rectify the issue with chronic rule breakers (and honestly, 3 months is not a long period of time at all). The staff now is currently one of the most active staffs GR has every had, they are all *generally* online at least once a day, their mod actions per day are well above anyone elses in the past, and from what I have seen, they are quite good at dealing with problems.

    In terms of corruption, 90% of the time that will deal with me, and 90% of the time it will be false. I am the 'iron hand' of the staff, and when a staff member has a problem they cannot control, ie they have asked repeatedly for individuals to stop and they will not listen, they come to me, and I have to show a rough side and start tossing around warnings, suspensions and bans and moreso strictly than usual punishing people. There is a reason, however, that none of my bans are overturned, and all of them stick no matter how much members fuss about them. There is always a 100% solid reason for the ban / suspension / warn. People like to throw names and disregard self-responsibility, so naturally the one closest to the barrier gets it, which would be me. I am fine with this however, as I have a very tough exterior and nothing someone says to me here will ever effect me in the real world.

    Rules have rarely been broken without consequences (this being key). Nowadays, if you break a rule, you can expect to receive punishment, its that easy.

    There has been an extremely fast decline of lack of free resources that used to be abundant with Llamaman because people werne't self absorbed with credits. The marketplace is probably the one thing contributing the most to the downfall of GR, it was probably one of the main things contributing towards page hits of Gamerenders as well (we removed the ability to say Pro, Semi, Novice, etc. which was bringing a lot of traffic from other 'art' sites with people with huge egos who jsut came here to sell stuff for a quick buck). No one gives out anything for free anymore, everyone always expects something to do something, and very few people care about the community. This is a very traditional thing when it comes to sites reaching this size, bad seeds come, but don't break rules, and the good guys tend to go inactive or leave, or they mature and go elsewhere or make their own sites, etc. there is a lot of different options. Reputation is now a joke which used to be one of the few forms of 'currency' shared with people for giving to the site. GR v4 is bringing a new reputation mod setup to help encourage more sharing and less selling (not to mention 'improvements' to the marketplace).

    The only place activity really sparks anymore is in the General sections, most of which in the spam and flame forum because those are the two most relaxed sections. My 'crew' (see sig) is the most prodominant group of posters in these sections and most of them have been around GR for multiple years, actively posting and staying here, and most of them share the same opinion, proably bringing on the 'mob mentality' that GP was talking about because hes chronically insulted for the stupid things he says in most of his posts (again, as I said, look for yourself for an example).

    As a member whom was here when the boards were phpBB and my first account here being in the top 1,000 of the IPB boards, I have seen the decline, and its just something that happens. GR has been around for over 5 years now, and within the last year or two its decline can be contributed largely to the above factors primarily. There are always people who get bored and leave, people who get fed up with dealing with the bad seeds and leave, people who were here purely for profit who left, people who were here just for giving things out who have left because they received no gratitude. Most of this falls back onto the staffs back for being 'bad staff' or the staff are purely responsible for the downfall of the site, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The staff are here solely to maintain the forums, and the forums are in the best shape they have been in for years, its the populas of the site which are the largest contributor to decline in activity here at the site.
     
  10. .c1

    .c1 Well-Known Member

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    LOL from April 2ndish to now
     
  11. ArchPriest

    ArchPriest Well-Known Member

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    Dementia,

    I applaud your long and full explanation of things. I have done a lot of staff and Admin work on sites of various sizes (Varying from 50 active posters to hundreds of thousands of registered users). I have found many of the same things that you have described to be true.

    I must first say that in my experience, I know that toughness you must have. What one person does, and how you view that as an administrator doesn't translate to the average user always, nevertheless to the 15 year old, best friend of the newly banned, former member. Often times their complaints spread out to others who have similar frivolous complaints, until you can have an entire conspiracy theory worked out against you. And to no fault of your own.

    I don't think that most people realize the sacrifice made to do what HAS to be done. The countless hours Admins work, often unpaid or most certainly underpaid are almost always thankless. The very community that they work to uphold can lash out against them over the smallest things. Some may call it an "Iron Fist" but if only those same people didn't create the reason for the rules to be there in the first place.

    Bad seeds do come in many forms... Sometimes they are the jovial type who thing they are doing nothing wrong, posting random gibberish in every post they read. I used to call them the "must posters" meaning that they HAD to post SOMETHING in every thread that they opened, usually because it upped their post count. I had one guy that would pump out 20 - 30 replies every hour he spent on the forums.

    Many times they are a tie-in with the "Self-Promoters" which is a group we are all familiar with. The US is all about capitalism, but sometimes it takes the friendliness and fun out of everything. A perfect example of the complications this creates is the "Rights Battle." Full rights, learning rights, posting rights, signature rights, it's all a mess. Digital art can be easily emulated or copied, used as source material, and application of rights to things from millions of different artists around the world, in all forms of application... It's a logistical nightmare to try and track it all.

    From last time I was here I had a few thousand PSD files that I bought. I recall how I would have to verify that the layers weren't going to be merged, and hours of talks about where and when I could use them. All the while I kept saying "Listen, I just want to see how you did it so that I can add the TECHNIQUE to my repertoire, not the actual tag. I want to bend it to my own creativity, not copy and paste it..."

    As far as resources, if I get more time on my hands I can start to bring back all of my old stuff and start making tutorials and posting them.

    It is good to hear that you guys are making an effort to crack down more on violators. And that you're taking the effort to improve the actual website.

    Is there any plan to make it easier to view the tutorials, renders, etc? The old search button works just fine, but a properly functioning content system could vastly improve the resources and their availability simply by consolidating them.

    Anyways, I could go on and on as I mentioned, but it's good to hear what you have to say about it. Just know that as tough an exterior as you think you have to have, there are still people out there who appreciate what you do.

    -Priest
     
  12. KinXiom

    KinXiom Well-Known Member

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    I'm going to be completely honest, I saw this site go downhill when credits turned until points on a forum instead of 'cash'. Just what i saw.
     
  13. dementia

    dementia Well-Known Member

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    It has been brought up, but nothing has been decided, we have considered implementing a script in GR v4 like P2L has for a nice tutorial repository, and of course a more active downloads section if we can find an actual download script that would function correctly and not just clutter and confuse the members of the site. I suppose a few modifications to the search function could also work equally as well, we will have to see, and unfortunately it takes a fair bit of time for the other staff members to talk to the coder of v4 as the only one with direct communication to him and his team is Shaggy.

    I applaud what would appear to be your commitment to the site, we could use more members like yourself, bringing up suggestions and offering your assistance towards the community of the site for the benefit of the site more than personal gain, it speaks a lot to your personality.

    Very true, as I said, the marketplace was both a blessing and a curse, largely alongside the reputation system.
     
  14. Creamlistner

    Creamlistner Well-Known Member

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    Honestly, not to be putting the site down, for I was a member from quiet a while ago that has come back...
    Things are too based upon signatures, yes I know their are large art areas and such, but as far as tutorials go? competitions? resources?
    Who knows, maybe I'm at the wrong forums and need to find something more -----, but signatures get really old really quick, they are easy and not very interesting... Would be nice to see some of the old GR stuff come back, I remember when you could buy premium memberships with credits, what happened to that?

    But yes, I hear ya, just not the same, forums are not near as active as they once were...
     
  15. dementia

    dementia Well-Known Member

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    We did premium tutorials for a while, but all of the tutorials submitted were horribly written, horrible outcomes, or just copies of what we already had with different filter settings. After going nearly 9 months without getting a single worth while tutorial submission we decided it simply wasn't worth it (we only had like 15 tutorials highlighted anyways). We were doing resource competitions once upon a time, but at most we'd get is 2-3 submissions a month, which isn't grounds for competition at all, we let that run for ~6 months or so.

    You can still buy Platinum (Ruby) and Donator (Diamond) memberships with credits, just not via the store because we couldn't get the item to work correctly when we were implementing it (again, problems with the code). You can PM any admin and ask them if they would be willing to do that for you, and we do it at the exchange rate of whatever is current OR 200:1 (which is what the GR Bank account sells credits at if I am not mistaken, assuming Shaggy is still running that). Platinum memberships, however, are reserved for cash.

    Why you may ask? Because this server costs multiple hundreds of dollars a month in revenue we don't get via ads, so memberships are the only way we have of providing income (thus why Diamond and Platinum were even made to begin with). The current server is MUCH larger, and MUCH more expensive than what Llamaman was paying, and thus requires more income to keep it up. As is, Shaggy is pulling out of his personal pocket every month to keep GR alive on its own ads (this doesn't include the money he gets from the other sites hosted on this server, I am speaking purely of GR profits alone). GR has never paid for itself, ever.
     

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