Hyrist wrote:
It's been how many years now?
This will be the sixth. Second longest running forum tradition after the infamous forum prediction thread. We origionally started doing this when there was the OOT vs admin strife a while back to foster better community relations or something like that. I think the Magi thing was around then too.
2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 Hyrist wrote:
I want to tap the greymatter of the Admins here, including the Fiery Dragon himself. How has your journey through Zam's evolution been? I only joined up once FFXI became a thing, but have generally stuck through it.
I have seen some Admins come and go, and other ones join us, and others still stay for the long haul. How has it been on your end? How has the Admin community developed and changed for you?
Also. Exactly how many hairs lost/grey hairs gained has Kao suffered through on account of this site?
Well, we all have different stories, so the perspective will vary depending on who you ask. I started out as a user, way back around 2000. The origionall Kaolian account on the old UBB forums was actually lost in the first major board crash in allakhazam history, so that has always been somewhat of an approximate number, but it was somewhere around then. Started with a post from an account called "Kaolian from bertoxxulous" about how to find Ivy Etched Ranger Pants in Everquest. Many of my posts then have centered on pants for one reason or another, including the infamous "flan pants" debacle. But that's not important right now. Basically, at the start it was just Allakhazam (Jeff Moyer) and later Illia (Andy Sharp). They later brought on Darkflame (who later changed to DarQflame) as the first ever forum Admin. Danalog , Rale, Fleven, Ralius and Maia followed shortly therafter, along with the short lived Haggan who did not last long. Anyways, I got my start by hunting and destroying sock puppets as a user. Sock puppets really, really annoy me, and they were at one time killing a fairly thriving OOT community. Thundra, the worst offender had about 40 of them at one point. So anyways. I had no admin access, but I was pretty good at spotting them just from post content and "tone". So I would ship a PM off to Darqflame, ask her if they were a sockpuppet. she would check, and more often than not, they were. I also started hanging out in the forum=3 equivelent and answering site questions and things like that. Eventually, possibly due to a moment of insanity, Allakhazam decided to hire me, and I've been an admin ever since. It's been bumpy at times. I've almost been fired as forum admin 3 times that I know of, 2 of those times I later got appologies about. But overall aside from forums getting smaller everywhere in general, I like to think things have gone well overall.
Essentially I'm the only "just a forum admin" admin, so everyone else has game and community or news tasks that go with their various jobs, so they tend to focus more in terms of their game and the team assigned to that game, while i'm more of a generalist. Things have deffinitly changed over the years. It started out as a very small admin group, now we are huge, with multiple sister sites. I don't even know all the admins anymore. It definitly seems like we have a bit mroe turnover than we did before, but there are also more games, and they come and go with more frequincy.
Jophiel wrote:
I suppose your answer will have to be corporate-approved cheery but how do you view the future of a large, multi-game website like this when so many games now hold you by the hand through quests and have well-populated official forums? I ask because I notice that forum participation seems to be down across the board even for large popular games like WoW and newer game forums never seem to take off. But then I play a game like Tera Online and it's no real wonder that you wouldn't need a quest/spoiler site because there's nothing much to really discover or decipher; you just go where the waypoint says to do, do what it says to do and get a predetermined reward. No open world camps, no named mobs with placeholders, etc.
I see a mixed future honestly. Part of the problem here is we fragment our own userbase. If we had a common login, forum structure and account settings for all the sites that fall under the umbrella corporation that owns ZAM, we would have a much better chance of keeping forum users. Having different forum systems forces people to choose and ends up with ultimatly smaller communities. Then there are the official forums. the biggest advantage they have over us is that they don't have banner ads plastered all over their forums, which means more repeat visitors. The fact that they are corporate forums though is also their biggest weakness. Their bosses don't want people saying mean things about their games. For example, the latest FFXIV rebuild official forums were quite frankly Draconian in their posting restrictions. I was well and truly impressed by the amount of banning they were doing. but that created an oppertunity for us. By letting people more freely express themselves here, we actually managed to poach an average of 1,600 unique forum visitors per 15 minutes from them, which is huge. Unfortunatly the game itself seems to not be living up to expectations, but if that had truly ended up as a "wow killer" that would have kept that forum going quite well. as is its still doing 300 unique visitors on average, but times are tough. As for the sites themselves, they have both gotten easier and harder to implement. In the beginning, you had a single game with a core of programmers who really wanted to be involved with that game, and an army of people contributing info. Now, the game usually dumps an item and quest file we can just import into a database, and half the time the corporate sites have one that works better than ours just because they have direct table access. You end up with programmers scrambling to make new sites to keep up, management guessing which game will become popular and which one isn't worth the time (and it is not an exact science) and games that evolve out of our model. We have had success in identifying areas where the corporate sites fall short and filling those gaps, but they also learn from us along the way. Facebook and other forum alternatives have also taken a chunk out of our traffic. I certanly remain open to suggestions on how to increase traffic, but this site will never be a reddit or a FARK forum in size and post count unfortunatly. The focus is too narrow. That being said, the general trend has actually been an increase in traffic in many areas of the forums.
Demea wrote:
Where and when should we do the next Asylum get-together? It's been, like, a decade since the last one.
Left coast!
Rachel9 wrote:
What's my karma?
A lame 3.30533629450804
snailish wrote:
All the Zam admin are locked in room with equal game rigs, a snack/drink allocation. They can't interfere in real life with each other, they can only play the game.
The game is Everquest (since these forums were born out of this). The scenario is a combination of the Discord server and the Hunger Games (or Battle Royale if you prefer Japanese source material) --meaning last in game character alive wins.
Which admin wins? (and why).
Me! because I'm the only ranger and rangers are awsome!
Who fails first?
Me! because I'm the only ranger and Sony Hates Rangers©
Who makes alliances with intentions (and what are those intentions. Example Calthine and Kaolian ally against Fleven because he ate an extra cookie last week).
Old school vs. the new recruits. Though if Fleven ate the extra cookie... Hmm. We would definitly want Ralius and Fleven on our side though because they know mroe about EQ than the rest of us. Darqflame and myself as well. Probably the EQ2 people since they could be useful. that and all the clerics. clerics keep the ranger alive, ranger keeps the other bad guys pissed at him and kills them off slowly while everyone else beats down on them.
Who can't handle EQ and kills themself on purpose?
Probably some of the FFXI admins. the Jump Button would scare them.
Bonus points: what would each admin play to reflect themselves accurately and to be more impressive in victory.
Kaolian: Ranger. Darqflame: Necromancer. Allakhazam: Wizard. The rest of them, I'm not sure
His Excellency Aethien wrote:
Also, can you make me an admin so I can rate down Xsarus help fight the spammer and euh.. do admin-y stuff...? What the hell do you guys even do aside from banning spammers?
I don't have a make people admin button. you would have to talk to Darqflame about that one. As to what else we do, most of the other admins have game stuff to enter, edit, moderate, and aquire. Yes, they get paid to play video games. For me, I ban spammers, arbitrate forum disputes, investigate karma camping, remove banned threads to forum=999 (spammer hell) to free up the front page slots, move threads, mute people, norate people, unmute people, answer questions, try and fix things, report things that are broken, put in requests for new forum features, and make bad puns.
Jophiel wrote:
...something something magazine something something...
If we all get together and order a PC gamer off ebay from 1996 and send it to you would that finally end the pain?
<click here to contribute to the buy jophiel a magazine paypal fund> Spoonless wrote:
Is 20 dmg for the hit like 30 dmg if a RNG shoots?
Yes, but only if it hits anything. EQ rangers, despite being experts with a bow, are apperently not allowed to hit anything smaller than a mountain with any degree of certanty. I blame crooked bird feathers for the arrow fletchings.
bodhisattva wrote:
What is Joph's actual post count now?
63,899
And i'll see if I can get more admins in here.
rdmcandie wrote:
How do i stop ads from auto reloading all effing day? (without using adblocker because I like to pretend I provide support.)
Edited, Nov 16th 2013 2:16pm by rdmcandie
Buy Premium!
someproteinguy wrote:
What the best question anyone ever asked on ask an admin day?
What's the worst?
Why do you always do this on weekends?
Best is a toss up. I like the ones that ask about the history of the place, or things that people haven't asked before that take a bit of thought and effort to answer. The ones about the M0nk item always go well. people wanting to know the behind the scenes stories about what goes on, or insights into the admins themselves. I'm always suprised at how few general personal questions we get.
Worst:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=28&mid=135309959019263348&h=50&p=5#202 As far as why we start them on weekends, it's because in addition to this job, I work full time during the day at a certain state government agency, which makes accessing and answering game forum questions somewhat more problematic than usual.
Jophiel wrote:
Do you have any leads on where I could get a quality counterfeit ID, SEO tips or watch Thor 2 streaming for free?
Apperently India is the place for that. Need any phone numbers?
[quote=Iamadam]Did DF finally start growing a mustache?[/quote]
I don't think so?
[quote=Shaowstrike the Shady]Who's that Pokemon?[/quote]
Pikachu apperently