Closing Mugen Lair?

[G.o.D.]

Let's try this experiment.

We... yes, we are all seeing how this forum is going.
No activity at all, except for some releases like the ones by GLB (who released nice stages) and Arachno-Man (another stage creator I don't like his stages, they're too blurry and jpeg-like).

The regulars either are gone or log in and do nothing.
Yes, I can see you:

Total: 7 (Visible: 6, Hidden: 1)
G.o.D., axkeeper, Catastrophe, Arachno-Man, The Crow aka Colosse, rafyandino

In this board I find this topic:
http://mugenlair.freesmfhosting.com/index.php/topic,7155.0.html
(Mugen Lair will return online at 100%)
but nothing happened. It remained at 0.03% if anything.

Silverflame is not active (so you shouldn't remain as an admin if I were to follow your words), supermystery doesn't log in since 2013.

If I were an administrator, I could do nothing since this is not really my mugen forum "home", Mugen Fighters Guild is.
The only thing I could do is what I do now, posting sprites, banning spambots and in the case of a release (or something) post something, but nothing else.

I haven't the power for anything, and even if I had it I wouldn't do much.

The guests who register here then quickly go away. Or PM me to leech... ahem, ask "nicely" old stuff that not even the creators enjoy or have in their computers and then go away without even saying "Goodbye!". Or they advertise their site with a contradictory logic in hopes of receiving users.

The initial purpose of this forum was to release UB22 characters. Then, what happened? Supermystery got some feedback and he took it as an offence. So he started with the Member categories (Junior, Senior, etcetera): you could get his characters only if you belonged in one of those ranks. This was studied () for bringing more activity too.
As time passed by, that slowly lost efficiency.
And recently... one year ago, Supermystery released all of his UB22 characters, the same ones that gave him "offences" and feedback.
So, returning to the first period of this paragraph, this forum lost his goal of sharing creations from the people of this forum. Thus no activity.

[spoiler]
On another note, all the competitions (except for one) had one or two more votes than allowed. Some people (I think it was done from some moderators or admins at the time, I wasn't one when it happened) cheated and added one or two votes.

This forums accepts compilations. I don't.

When giving feedback, remember to not give constructive criticism and only say "Nice + 1" (this is me kidding obviously), that's how this forum worked before I got here. I see rare cases when feedback was actually something that helped the creators. Most of the times it was "Nice+1" in all kinds of broken English. That helped/helps no one improving.

Sometimes I talk to myself here, in a forum where others should post/reply/contribute.

The "innovative" Badge system is stupid and some of them don't show up.

Another thing to add to this list (since I'm listing all bad things this forum had):

And forget the [character] trading thing, this is not Yu-Gi-Oh where you change your cards with a friend; we're talking about files available everywhere.
The trading of characters for characters was pretty dumb since it started, and what if you "traded" a private character for another with a leecher-warehouser? That could have caused a lot of drama for just simple .sff,.cns,.air,.cmd,.act,.def,.snd files. Things that you can't touch but you can simply view in front of a screen and hear from the speakers.

Can you imagine that? Fighting over something that doesn't really exist? But it happened.
And what's more, this is a hobby, not a commercial job; I would understand if there was money involved.
In any case, if you want stuff to be private and/or unrequestable, first you don't release it, second you don't show it anywhere.

See? Bannings, dramas and requests wouldn't have been done, nothing would have happened.
Yes, fighting over nothing could have been avoided by just using your brain.

[/spoiler]
Now that this little rant is finished, I'm going to put a poll. It's just to see your opinion.

[The Crow aka Colosse]

I voted to close the forum since there is no admins in order to change the situation. The good times of this forum are gone...

[axel]

not close please this forum to me is very important, when it was a souvenir kid who was always in this forum downloading mugen games to play with my brother, also watching videos of hyper goku and the other chars dbzub22 hoping someday to play them but when they liberated the characters when I had forgotten about them and now I have more old learned to edit and create a mugen and that I can make to improve the stability of the forum.
that I never contributed anything because I was afraid not to know how to post correctly and speak Spanish do not speak English and can not find the rules of this place, maybe I get something wrong, but I want to help.

is that there are children who like to play mugen like me when I was before and I do not want to happen to them what happened to me.
perhaps with this translator is not well see this message, the only thing I want to say is that I want help, I want to contribute, to see if somehow you a good time.
I know that behind the crisis is a great opportunity to make this forum vuelba be as before.
I want to help but I need your help figuring out how to do it.
I do not want this forum to close 

[G.o.D.]

We're not closing, it's just an experiment to see if the users (if there are any) are still interested on this site or not.
So don't worry.

I can understand what you're saying, but I have no clue about how to handle this forum sadly.

The administrators are gone and if they get online they do nothing or say: "Hey Mugen Lair back to forces, it will be even more active than Mugen Guild!" (I'm exaggerating here) and then have some... bad ideas for competitions or no ideas at all.

Seriously, an idea about characters' intros? And how can you also think UB22 Goku's intro is the best?
First, it's a matter of tastes, but given everyone here likes DBZ and Bruce Faulconer's OST, anyone who would want to win would just use/do those. And the voters (if there were some) would vote that because they're more accustomed to that. So the votes would be biased.
Even then, would they be useful?

Video competition? What criteria would you use to judge a video? Must it be flashy?

Spriting competition? No one is here to sprite and the last competition we had was all kinds of stupid.

Character making competition? It would be ok, if it wasn't for biased votes/creations (flashiness/cheapness of the character over gameplay as long as it is """cool""").

Now it looks like I'm the one who's complaining but does nothing. So be it.
But if I did something it would be useless in any case. This forum has nothing to offer now, no one is actually here. This place has lost his identity of "Uber Mega Cheap Chars you get only with 1000+ posts" (another exaggeration) and it's just a shadow of the DBZ-must-be-cheap-and-UB22 era from 2008. If you think about it, Mugen Lair was very active only in 2008. We're in 2014 (and we're getting close to 2015), how can you attract more people with the same ideas?

You can't.


By the way, I'm the one that voted for "I don't know".

[axkeeper]

I helped a forum before and I gotta tell ya the thing you need is CONTENT!!!

People will not visit your forum unless you put out stuff. And as you put out stuff, you need to link it here through various sources, other forums, youtube, blogs, etc.

This forum is really good, it has a lot done right. An english DBZ forum could be big still.


 

Get those downloads hosted to and visitors will stick around and check in for more.

If you want your forum to have activity then you have to be good to your members, serve them in any way you can, advertise for them, offer hosting, help them in their wips, and encourage them.

Also you can update the forum with little stuff, like small customization editing can make your forum stand out from the rest of the other forums. The forum is too empty with blank spaces, it feels like it opened yesterday and no one ever visited yet. Change a few graphics, like add a dragonball to a button, make colored borders, anything like that will make it memorable and thus more visitor friendly for recollection.

[axel]

GoD thanks for replying, sorry for the delay, well I think it would be very good for chars screenpacks dbzub22 those supermystery and in the selection of characters who have portaits motion is possible by editing the selection cursor, and add good effects fightfx and to put the intro and the ending and encrypt it or you can not extrater characters and be a close game.
hey that occurs to me is not whether this good or bad my idea.
GoD when supermystery not ascended the hyper goku edit megagoku sammy the technic of hyper goku and I went something like goku hyper try to put some new technic to have some difference is other words it is similar to goku hyper character but I would like you to check and seen the gokuub22-27 because you are doing and also I would like to create ami chars dbzub22 and have a much as possible like the goku of dragonball z character ub22¿te can send by private message please?

[G.o.D.]

I can't understand a single thing of what you just said, so I doubt a PM would make it clear.
If you have coding problems post your questions in the Help board. If it's not that, then I don't know.

[GLB]

While I hold some history here, and I've been around for quite a while I think it'd be best to go ahead and close it down. But by that i mean just abandon it. I mean, there's only so much a Global Mod can do  (no offense G.o.D) at least they were lucky enough to keep around one staff member that cared and put in work for a little but.B But without admin power there's no way for you to bring the place back to life and you also said yourself, you don't consider this place home. Every forum attempting to be active needs active administrators. I think it'd be best for us all to just bow out, and not forget. There may be a possibility in the future of someone returning (or maybe not, i don't know how much contact you have with staff)

you did say this:

The administrators are gone and if they get online they do nothing or say: "Hey Mugen Lair back to forces, it will be even more active than Mugen Guild!" (I'm exaggerating here) and then have some... bad ideas for competitions or no ideas at all.

and that worries me most. if that's the case it's probably best to just give it a rest.