was just thinking on this. I used to be big active on Smashboards and back then, you could see the trickle over to xat and skype at first, then discord across the game releases - smashboards even had a native chat on the site at one point! Chatting outside of the forum had always been a thing but discords is when it became a problem. my suggestions would be:
- Host guides and highlight discussions (held elsewhere originally too) on Squidboards
- Answer discussions and threads with your thoughts on subjects, your input is valuable
- Don't aim to use the site to replace existing services, but use it to compliment and preserve collective knowledge and discussion
- If it doesn't work, it's okay
The intention with Squidboards shouldn't be as a replacement imo. But it should be a resource for guides ESPECIALLY and learning the game modes whether you're more interested in comp or SR, whatever. Its fine if the answer to that is that an established other site or community is the premier place to get experience or learn, so long as information isn't gatekept and you're opening discussion up. And if it doesn't work, that's fine. For S3 this is happening over a year from its release!
The way I look at it this forum + discord + twitter is going to be best used as seperate parts of one whole, not a one size fits all solution
Twitter is great for getting big news out to a large audience, even those outside the dedicated community.... but actually interacting with people on twitter is difficult and generally not worth the time.
This forum is great as a venue to host deeper discussions, post more niche news/community projects that people on twitter/discord might not get/take the wrong way(both
This thread made by Brush Strokes and
This thread made by Popgun are perfect examples of what I mean) but its not as efficent to communicate info quickly which is a must for TO's and staff needing to inform players of delays/seeding/round starts/ends/etc
on that note, Battefy is a great resource for making the tournament experience fluid and painless, and its another part of that whole I don't see many people bring up, since it removes a lot of the tedium involved in registering your team up for events and getting people in lobbies and the like, something that would be 10x more difficult if it needed to be done by hand, wheter on twitter/forum/or discord. Sendouq as well.
And Discord is 100% here to stay, VCIng is just too important to give up and being able to send and process messages almost instantly is a big draw. We'll just see how this forum shapes up in the long run but having been active here since Squid School made his short a few days ago, I've seen lots of positive things and I think if people look at it not as a
replacement to Twitter but as a
supplement to it, as a community we might be able to make it work.
Another big positive is with a lot more space dedicated to individual profiles on a forum like this, its much easier to remember faces and learn big community names, something that is pretty hard for me to do on dedicated social media platforms.
