Long term health of mafiascum

[davesaz]

<soapbox>

I already suggested take it to normal queue, Maruchan. If you'd simply read anything rather than whining you'd have known that.

I swear people want this site to die.

This kind of snark is what kills the site.
If we want people to stay it would really help a lot to be courteous, kind, and friendly. Yeah hard to do in a game, but c'mon, snark in a discussion thread?
</soapbox>

In other news...
Even if it's manual to begin with, a one-stop shopping center for open slots would be huge. I bookmark a couple queue threads but the games that have signups in a separate thread come and go before I even know they're open. If there were a dashboard that shows type of game, flavor genre, and open slots it would be an immense help.

The ability to pull role cards directly from a set of standard ones would make modding much easier. Even for people like me who have only modded opens with no flavor, having to translate each role from wiki format to PM format is a real pain in the ass. Automated vote counts definitely nice, and I plan to hit Mathblade up for votecounter next time I mod. Better yet how about an interface that makes votes and perhaps night actions a button press? If NA's are standardized then automating the resolution is appealing too. Not that I mind doing that part, I actually like processing night -- it's one of the reasons I prefer to mod games that have lots of active roles.

I have back end and design skills. No experience at all in the web page coding/generating and UI part, but if you need conceptual user experience story design or data storage/processing/retrieval just say the word. The site needs a way to identify volunteers who have the skills it needs. And accept help...

[davesaz]

Do the other sites being mentioned have an issue with spam in games?

Random idea, when a game ends use a "rate this site" 1-5 stars type thing with a comment box.

[davesaz]

Just thinking of how other sites / apps get user feedback.

[davesaz]

I don't think the two weeks are really needed. People could adapt to 10 days if they were presented with the opportunity.
We say we're waiting for people to contribute, and more often than not they either don't have anything to say or are actually unavailable.
I don't think I've ever had a day deadline expire and still have something to say about it. I've had days hammered while I had something to say, but never deadline expiring.

[davesaz]

If active games per player decreases keeping players constant, then the available player slots could end up being less than available game slots.

I don't fully get how this isn't offset by players freeing up faster via being removed from games faster, nor do I get why having shorter deadlines inherently decreases active games per player.

[davesaz]

How much of the reduction is banned users?

[davesaz]

Not really...
What is the time scale of the graph?

[davesaz]

Here's how I'm interpreting the data.

The first graph is how many unique id's post per month, and shows a long-term trend of -2 users per month (loss of roughly 150 active over 67 months) with a slightly steeper shorter term trend.
Second graph is how many new uniquie id's registered and posted per month. I didn't calculate the trend line but it's down a little too.
Putting the two graphs together shows there is a steady turnover of around 30/450 or a little under 7% of membership?

I'd call the turnover the issue, from just the graphs it appears the majority of new users are not staying and some old guard fade.
It's possible to go deeper by looking at join date and last post date (within the same filter) to see a scatter chart for duration of stay.

[davesaz]

The (downtime??) is a discontinuity. Easier to eyeball starting after that point.
Old eyes followed the wrong horizontal line.

[davesaz]

Technology wise the best way toward an automated VC would be the ability to vote from a pick list. That might help with mobile as well. I don't personally know how to do it.
The reason this is important is that fully auto VC depends on 100% accuracy in player names/nicknames/abbreviations. A pick list would guarantee that accuracy.
If we settle for mostly automated, there is a very promising project underway.

[davesaz]

I regret mentioning that word.

@Psyche - we can probably settle for near-perfect. Did you get access to the coding place? We can take the discussion on details over there so this thread doesn't get overwhelmed with the tech talk.

What do you all think about a more automated sign-ups page that summarizes all the games in signups regardless of queue, and lets people in/out with clicks? Would that help with accessibility? Even if the page just consolidates the info from the signup threads without the click to sign up I think it might be helpful. I remember the hardest thing for me was figuring out where to go to get in a game *now*.