Be Excellent To Each Other

I got the 60-day domain renewal warning for UTJ through this morning. Is it actually worth keeping?

It had 253 visits in the last month:
For the terms
It drove 127 people to Beex, which is a good CTR if you assume they weren't Beexer's already (which I doubt actually, because Beexers might just type the URL or hit a favourite).
However, this is 127 out of 123,000 visits, and we appear to have an actual conversion rate of zero.

I won't throw away all your work, of course, it will still exist as beex.co.uk/utj or something. But as a device to drive people toward the main site (and get free games, obv) it has failed, imo.

Many of us have written for it, but in the main there seems to be little interest from the posters on here in keeping it fresh or helping out. It's a shame but really you can only get out of a community what you put in.

And at the end of the day there's no "I" in "Team", but you have to dig deep and give it 110%.

I think we need to form a coalition website with WoSBlog, and agree to disagree on Forza.

Can't argue with that. I thought it might have worked out, but it looks like there are just too many sites out there doing a similar thing and updating more frequently. It probably doesn't help that quite a few of us having our own sites to look after too.

I wonder if it's worth putting the reviews in a sub-forum on here? Perhaps not worth the hassle though.

Realistically I think it only has any value as a place to archive pieces that people want to write anyway (such as a review of something we're all interested in). So that it's easier to find than a thread on here.

But even that is debatable. And yes, nobody has time / can be bothered really.

I think there are a quite a few here who are interested in videogames journalism. They enjoy having a go themselves and I like reading their contributions. I don't think it's fair to berate those of us who have not the slightest interest as lazy, though. However I do worry about where we're going to get new members from.

I don't think anyone has done that, have they?

The problem was when the supply of free games dried up. If we'd managed to get a flow of titles, I think you'd have enough people here putting their hands up and saying "yeah, I'll write a short review of that in return for a free copy" to keep content flowing.

I'd let it go, personally.

I always feel guilty when thinking about "up to jump".

I like writing and I'd love to write more stuff for it. Like everyone else though, I struggle to find the time. I'm sure I've got 4 or 5 reviews on my PC at home that are in an unfinished state.. shame.

Is there anything we can do to refine it slightly to promote the forum? I don't know what.. but make it like a shop window to this place.

No, you're right. I must be feeling guilty

I will put my hand up as someone who's never had the slightest interest, but was happy to review/approve work from others if necessary. I don't think it's successful as a "people-gathering" tool, but whether it has its own value based on providing somewhere for people to write, I dunno. Then again I guess it doesn't need its own domain for the latter.

In terms of "people gathering", I'm sure quite a few guys here belong to numerous other forums, no doubt some of them pretty big ones like rllmuk etc. Would it be worth while tarting BEEX around them? Just a thought likes.

(Unfortunately, the only other forum that I frequent these days is WoS)

I'm not sure we need to people gather in any significant way, do we? It's starting to sound a bit like Scientologists offering a free Thetan reading.

Well we at least a dribble, just to counteract flouncing.

We need to people gather in some way, though.

Well, we've had ZOMG N00Bzlors like Gill turn up by recommendations, which seems to work well.

The flipside is that people could stop being flouncey girls.

While I dislike the idea of dropping Beex into conversation as it strikes me as a little spammy, I think ideas like inter-forum 8-bit challenges (ie. the top 5 Beex scores vs the top 5 tllmuk scores) or Beex vs x Halo3 matches a good idea.

We might be better off as a gaming clan

Now here's something I can get involved with! Not any of the games you mentioned though, I suck at them
Getting some gaming on would be awesome though.

Yes. Albeit that most of us are rubbish at games and rarely play them.

Speak for yourself! I'm rubbish at games and play them a fair bit.

Well, I came from ugvm and while there is some crossover there, I can see a few more popping across once in a while, as usenet continues its decline

Inter-group/forum/clan challenges, are the best way I believe, as that is how I heard of you guys many many years ago. If people join off the back of that, then they are the right sort of people to join (but then I would say that! )

I'd like to see it integrated in to this site to be honest. Just a link on the banner to the "BEEX Gamers Magazine" or something. It's a nice read and pulling into a site I visit daily would get me, at least, reading it more often.

While this is all up for debate right now, that would be using it entirely backward from it's original purpose. We don't need you to read it - you're here already

Like having snippits from the interesting threads of that week with a few funnies thrown in?

Oh...

Usenet is deader than the Amiga and has been for years. Can't see us pulling anyone from there. As soon as everyone had ADSL, hence web forums were practical, Usenet was dead apart from the nerds.

So one option is switching the site off and just redirecting the domain here.
How do the people who've written stuff feel about that?

Another is to repurpose it as a game match noticeboard type thinger. Is there a WP plugin for that?

Have you actually visited UGVM at all? It's actually quite a healthy community, of a similar size to Beex in terms of regular posters, but I do wonder where the new blood is going to come from.

Well that seems a little pointless. Doesn't even save the cost of the domain fees.

Er, no - we'd lose the domain and host the site here, not the other way around.


It'd be a "from scratch" thing for that, but it wouldn't be hard. And yes, I imagine there would be.

But that's only a quid a year or something isn't it? Surely that's nothing compared to the hosting cost?

Have you actually visited UGVM at all? It's actually quite a healthy community, of a similar size to Beex in terms of regular posters, but I do wonder where the new blood is going to come from. [/quote]

I'm talking in general. I was on Usenet 1995 until about 2003 and the drop in traffic was happening then. I looked at some of my old groups a year or so ago and in once case a group that used to get about 200 posts a day is down to about 20. Across the broad range of groups I read if you remove spam posting levels are probably 25% of what they were in 2001.

I'm talking in general. I was on Usenet 1995 until about 2003 and the drop in traffic was happening then. I looked at some of my old groups a year or so ago and in once case a group that used to get about 200 posts a day is down to about 20. Across the broad range of groups I read if you remove spam posting levels are probably 25% of what they were in 2001.[/quote]

Oh yes, I agree in general

However I was talking in the specific ugvm case

Er, about £7 a year. And yes, it's fuck all compared to the hosting cost, I guess.

Put Beex amateur porn on it and use the profits to pay for forum hosting

True but it would be nice to keep it running to some degree. I mean, every so often someone's going to want to write something that everyone wants to read. The long forum posts about living for a week in GTA could fit quite nicely into the site for example or just write ups about peoples holidays and adventures. It could become about us instead of games. Also it gets around problems of interesting posts being over a billion pages by allowing some people to take it and form it into an article and linking back to the original posting.

A record of what we are and what we've done for people to easily read instead of trudging through pages on here.

Oh certainly. As I said in the first post, it'll still exist in exactly the same way, but in a different place (under the beex.co.uk domain, most probably).

It's a good idea but articles posted on there suffer from the problem of having no discussion or comment attached. Why would you, when there's a forum right here. But the article isn't here! So it tends to kill further discussion in either place.

If the site had a headline, an intro with picture, and then jumped to the actual article posted in a thread on beex, it might be more beneficial and serve the purpose better.

That's how I originally envisioned it working - it'd take the first post of a thread that someone hit 'submit' on and display it elsewhere, linking back to the original post - that's what the old reviews forum was for. I don't know what happened to that idea, to be honest.

I assume Teh Site idea was shinier so everyone wanted to do that.

I did try, but found usenet to be not so usable as I used to find it.

I could just cram the Little Savages 4 forum straight into this one. That'd get us about four more regulars at least

That would have been the best way to do it I'd have thought. Would that be an easy change to make now?

BeeX doesn't really need any pimping. It's the perfect size whereas places like RLLMUK are just too big for my liking. BeeX gets plenty of action each day and thankfully still isn't blocked by my IT department.

I would write a lot more for UpToJump, but I haven't got very much free time at the moment.

Just a suggestion - why not repurpose the site as a more general review/article/feature/writing type affair rather than just video games? More people might contribute.

Bean bag reviews and stuff?

The 10 greatest Vimto recipes.

I like the idea of being able to "article-ize" good informative threads onto the site, especially if it could be done mostly automatically.

Then, if you fancy writing something, just do a post, no need to think extra-hard about it because it's going to be "published", because you can decide afterwards.

Of course, what qualifies and what doesn't...

Is up to the SubEd group, a group of volunteers.

Well there are plenty of helpful threads: Photos/Camera Gear, Cars, Networking, 360 borked, iPhone/iPad etc

They'd be a good start.

We just need Chinny to be the cyber host for our 'Pebble Mill 2.0'.

Wait, what? I think you are minusnderstanding this.
You'd take one post (the first one, ideally) of a thread, and once the subeds have said "RAWK" it'd go live in some "other place", just the first post. The first post would become a review, or article, or whatever. The 'comments' link at the bottom of the page would link to the original forum thread.