Are you still there...?

OK. Third thread I've ever made, if memory serves correctly.

Obvious from the title, the thread came from the concern about the dwindling userbase. Dark_Plague and I thought of making this thread to... I dunno. He had to go somewhere. At first I suppose it was for members to state whether or not they are active or at least around, for we still get visits from old members (Sean and Lazer popped in yesterday and today respectively, to name two), and probably to make a formal announcement once someone decides to leave.

But other than that depressing topic, this thread will probably be good for some topicless talk because the chatbox requires simultaneous online presence and because, like the Pokemon thread, the General Chat could use a redo and a fresh start.

There's still a bit left to do on the GAC. Some stalls remain open while the carnival begins to close down and the crowd begins to thin, so have at them while they are still there!
So come one, come... those who remain. Liven up the GAC while it has a few miles to go. The friendships made here will endure, obviously; the Steam and Skype groups stand testimony to that, but the forum can still use a bit of lovin'!

I still check this forum regularly, it's just that at one point my browser auto logged me out, and I just never felt the need to log back in and make a post. I think the way my forum experience works is that I'll latch on to a forum, and make it my primary one for a good few months, and I'll switch when that becomes boring. I've been a lot more active on the MCforums lately, and that will probably continue to be the case for a while longer, as I'm working towards releasing a map.

I understand your reasoning behind making this thread, and thinking that the GAC is on its last legs, but I think we just need something to kick us back into gear. KoNS did that incredibly well, and heck, if it's another original roleplay that will get us posting again, so be it.

EDIT: Oh, also, we need to get Hutch, 3D, or Drew in here and make Delta an admin. Just 'cause that would be the absolute best thing ever.

Every few weeks I come back and check on this forum. The only reason I don't post here is because there's absolutely nothing interesting going on. At all. This forum is very worn out; ever since the Spore community stopped being a thing, this forum doesn't really have a good premise and there's nothing here to promote any discussion except habit.

I don't have the time or patience to waste my time on things that aren't productive, and talking on this forum is the exact opposite of productive in my experience. I mainly spend my time at MSPA forums for a few reasons:
- Homestuck is pretty awesome
- The forums are where the better parts of the fandom hang out; the terrible parts of the fandom that most people hear about come from Tumblr

I also have my own forum adventure that I update regularly, so I rarely make any posts in other parts of the forum and mainly focus my attention on drawing and writing. Honestly, I don't even bother with this place any more because there's nothing else it can offer me.

I absolutely loved this forum back in its glory days, when we had active Spore discussion, adventures, contests, and all that stuff. There's just nothing here anymore except the "show us how much time you waste on memebase by posting random pictures and terrible memes" thread. I highly suggest that if the community wants more activity, then you should actually do something instead of being stuck in the same habitual loops that keep you running on empty.

Alternatively, you could just make a whole new forum with a real purpose that people can actually enjoy and feel accomplished with, maybe one dedicated to art. Somewhere where people can share drawings, writing, music, whatever and get constructive feedback from a controlled, willing audience. I would definitely participate more in a forum like that.

I really do believe that what this forum needs is one big push. Like KNoS, as Drago said. Although not many of us really post here, it's great to see that we're all still friends and still keep in contact, through Skype or Steam. Speaking of which, I do believe that Skype is the main one we use, so I hope that everybody could get Skype and add me, so then I could add you into the GAC Skype Group we have. d4rkpl4gue is my username, if you would love to join us.

Another thing, I also think that we need one of the Admins to come back over here, and select one of us (Preferably Delta) as our new admin.

Technically, I'm still here, though very rarely. I spoke to you yesterday, and I check the threads every couple days, but rarely post. Here's why, for those of you wanting to know. (I'm betting some of you dont, lol)

-Increase in Minecraft (I play it more, and spend a lot of time in other, new communities like a survival server I now play on. It's sad to think how detached I am from this forum now, but I can often relate people from my new communities to you guys, so I at least have a community to be in.

-School. I'm only in 7th grade, but with all my homework and the time I spend when free is usually Minecraft, reading, riding my bike, etc, not going on forums. With taking Algebra, specifically, I get a ton more homework than usual.

-I'm Jewish, and 12, so I'm having a Bar Mitzvah in 5 months. In that time I do tutoring, Hebrew School, and home practicing. It's a small reason, but it still contributes.

-Life. I know a lot of you have seen me through time as young, sometimes spazzy, not completely understanding, and I do tent to argue about certain things. But now I'm getting more and more mature, for your information, and I've been stepping into higher roles. I'm in the school band, play piano better than ever, and practice a lot. I'm the 'CEO' of a robotics club at my school, and we will be competing at MATE's annual ROV competition, which takes effort too. And finally, I've been known to love science and math. Recently I got a notebook to write theories. I've been righting down weird patterns I find in math, and I even came up with a theory of Cosmology/High Energy Physics, which I've been typing up and I'm even going to meet with the head of theories at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, because he's interested in my ideas.

Anyway, I know this is long, but it's somewhat of a 'hi, bye' post and I felt I needed to explain why I'm gone. Thanks,

-Lazer

Lazernugget wrote:

-Life. I know a lot of you have seen me through time as young, sometimes spazzy, not completely understanding, and I do tent to argue about certain things. But now I'm getting more and more mature, for your information, and I've been stepping into higher roles. I'm in the school band, play piano better than ever, and practice a lot. I'm the 'CEO' of a robotics club at my school, and we will be competing at MATE's annual ROV competition, which takes effort too. And finally, I've been known to love science and math. Recently I got a notebook to write theories. I've been righting down weird patterns I find in math, and I even came up with a theory of Cosmology/High Energy Physics, which I've been typing up and I'm even going to meet with the head of theories at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, because he's interested in my ideas.

Dude.

I don't care what anybody says, you're one of the coolest middle schoolers alive

Lazernugget wrote:

-Life. I know a lot of you have seen me through time as young, sometimes spazzy, not completely understanding, and I do tent to argue about certain things. But now I'm getting more and more mature, for your information, and I've been stepping into higher roles. I'm in the school band, play piano better than ever, and practice a lot. I'm the 'CEO' of a robotics club at my school, and we will be competing at MATE's annual ROV competition, which takes effort too. And finally, I've been known to love science and math. Recently I got a notebook to write theories. I've been righting down weird patterns I find in math, and I even came up with a theory of Cosmology/High Energy Physics, which I've been typing up and I'm even going to meet with the head of theories at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, because he's interested in my ideas.

Holy crap.

If that's true then you're gonna be showing up on the news soon.

I still check in frequently, I just don't find much to post about.

Alright, who voted No. :I

DRaGO wrote:

Lazernugget wrote:

Snip

Holy crap.

If that's true then you're gonna be showing up on the news soon.

Gelatino95 wrote:

Lazernugget wrote:

Snip

Dude.

I don't care what anybody says, you're one of the coolest middle schoolers alive

I'm overwhelmed at your responses, and thanks, you guys just made my day. Even better than it was before- which was great. Lol. I'm not sure if I'll be in the news, but getting in contact with the Head of Theories guy can at least help me boost myself to higher things. As for ROV, I also did it last year. My team lost, but it's been great fun doing it. Thanks guys

On a side note Hannukah's tomorrow, and I'm hoping for some good stuff :3

I'm pretty much always lurking in the background (and usually after all the northern dwellers go to bed, the forum pretty much turns into my domain).

I'm actually quite interested in Gelo's idea of creating a new, better forum, though. I would give some of my ideas on the matter, but I'm posting from my IPhone and can't use my computer ATM.

Also lurking.

Likewise to Frostie and Kitty, I'm lurking.

I knew I would have to come and address this at some point.

First of all, my apologies for kinda leaving you guys in the dark and vanishing. Life has gotten really bad for me. I have failed school this year and I am becoming very depressed. It affected what life I had on the internet dramatically so I needed to leave before I did anything dumb and without thought. I left the sporum and its groups also because I am mentally unfit for them. So I am coming here to kinda say goodbye just in case. I will be doing the same with GAC until I am better. Again, I must say sorry but life before internet, you know?

Here is what I will do in the meantime, I will make Delta an admin (Only if he accepts the position, I will not force it on him) and he may decide what to do from now on. I can't make the choice right now, I honestly cannot. I am literally unstable and would not be able to account everyones opinions and make the choice best for everyone.

Personal opinion here, stick it out here. Eurospore completely died when it moved to another forum after slowing down in less than a week. It's not wise to repeat mistakes made by others in the past. Any changes can be made here that work just as well as starting a new forum. It's not necessary as long as you have at least one active admin. I would also recommend if you have not already, join the Skype group.

I honestly will miss many of you, do not assume I don't care about any of you or do not assume just because I have had past disagreements with you that I don't care. I value everyone I know a lot and I wish I could spend more time here with you guys but I cannot. If I do come back, I hope to find you guys still enjoying yourselves here.

You can contact me by email if you would like Drew980@yahoo.com

I check the forum daily, but really, theres nothing to do or post about here anymore. I would like to bring this forum back to life, and restore it to it's glory days, but doing that would require a lot of effort from a lot of the active members of the forum. I'm thinking of rebooting Terwynd's topics, as that seemed to be what a lot of people enjoyed reading, both inside and out of the GAC, but likewise, I'll need a LOT of help getting started.

I just popped in to see how this thread went in terms of replies. I was not expecting

Swear word:

Gelatino95 wrote:

Every few weeks I come back and check on this forum. The only reason I don't post here is because there's absolutely nothing interesting going on. At all. This forum is very worn out; ever since the Spore community stopped being a thing, this forum doesn't really have a good premise and there's nothing here to promote any discussion except habit.

Well to that, I can only offer the new Pokemon thread as a method of retaining your interest. With a possibility of planned battles, trades, and whatnot, stuff might actually happen. I might even use it as a Pokegen request shop, if that actually gets people interested.

Lazernugget wrote:

-Life. I know a lot of you have seen me through time as young, sometimes spazzy, not completely understanding, and I do tent to argue about certain things. But now I'm getting more and more mature, for your information, and I've been stepping into higher roles. I'm in the school band, play piano better than ever, and practice a lot. I'm the 'CEO' of a robotics club at my school, and we will be competing at MATE's annual ROV competition, which takes effort too. And finally, I've been known to love science and math. Recently I got a notebook to write theories. I've been righting down weird patterns I find in math, and I even came up with a theory of Cosmology/High Energy Physics, which I've been typing up and I'm even going to meet with the head of theories at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics, because he's interested in my ideas.

Not the first to acknowledge that but bloody hell. Even though you told me about submitting those theories I had no idea the stakes were so high. You are going to be very rich and successful when you grow up, possibly a supervillain.

Kitty wrote:

I'm pretty much always lurking in the background (and usually after all the northern dwellers go to bed, the forum pretty much turns into my domain).

Not so much lurking in the background as you are making (on average) the most posts per week.

Drew wrote:

I knew I would have to come and address this at some point.

First of all, my apologies for kinda leaving you guys in the dark and vanishing. Life has gotten really bad for me. I have failed school this year and I am becoming very depressed. It affected what life I had on the internet dramatically so I needed to leave before I did anything dumb and without thought. I left the sporum and its groups also because I am mentally unfit for them. So I am coming here to kinda say goodbye just in case. I will be doing the same with GAC until I am better. Again, I must say sorry but life before internet, you know?

Here is what I will do in the meantime, I will make Delta an admin (Only if he accepts the position, I will not force it on him) and he may decide what to do from now on. I can't make the choice right now, I honestly cannot. I am literally unstable and would not be able to account everyones opinions and make the choice best for everyone.

Personal opinion here, stick it out here. Eurospore completely died when it moved to another forum after slowing down in less than a week. It's not wise to repeat mistakes made by others in the past. Any changes can be made here that work just as well as starting a new forum. It's not necessary as long as you have at least one active admin. I would also recommend if you have not already, join the Skype group.

I honestly will miss many of you, do not assume I don't care about any of you or do not assume just because I have had past disagreements with you that I don't care. I value everyone I know a lot and I wish I could spend more time here with you guys but I cannot. If I do come back, I hope to find you guys still enjoying yourselves here.

You can contact me by email if you would like Drew980@yahoo.com

Too many simultaneous feels. Need to think before typing.

OK. For starters, my sympathies go out to your educational endeavours and your emotional well-being. That's a fair enough reason to leave a forum to run itself (but hey, it's not like we went nuts and graffitied the walls, or anything; we're too well behaved).

I (plus others) think that making Delta admin of the GAC is a good idea, as he pretty much has the qualities required for leading a bunch of internet misfits like ourselves.

You have a good point on the topic of making a new forum. I read up on Eurospore last night to see if it was still active and if the GAC could be integrated there, but it was empty. The note at the top of the page told of how they all tried to migrate to a new forum, but I didn't follow it up. At least now I know what happened. The GAC would last a lot longer on this forum.

That last paragraph of yours is very sweet. I hope to see you again too, and that we are all enjoying the GAC still.

Terwynd wrote:

I check the forum daily, but really, theres nothing to do or post about here anymore. I would like to bring this forum back to life, and restore it to it's glory days, but doing that would require a lot of effort from a lot of the active members of the forum. I'm thinking of rebooting Terwynd's topics, as that seemed to be what a lot of people enjoyed reading, both inside and out of the GAC, but likewise, I'll need a LOT of help getting started.

Quite simply, I'd help you out with that.

Dark_potato57 wrote:

Gelatino95 wrote:

Every few weeks I come back and check on this forum. The only reason I don't post here is because there's absolutely nothing interesting going on. At all. This forum is very worn out; ever since the Spore community stopped being a thing, this forum doesn't really have a good premise and there's nothing here to promote any discussion except habit.

Well to that, I can only offer the new Pokemon thread as a method of retaining your interest. With a possibility of planned battles, trades, and whatnot, stuff might actually happen. I might even use it as a Pokegen request shop, if that actually gets people interested.

I don't really play pokemon a lot any more. It doesn't seem like a very productive use of my time. I didn't bother getting black or white 2 and I mostly spend my time making awesome stuff instead. In fact, I don't think I've even used my DS for a few weeks.

Kitty wrote:

I'm actually quite interested in Gelo's idea of creating a new, better forum, though. I would give some of my ideas on the matter, but I'm posting from my IPhone and can't use my computer ATM.

We should definitely do something about this. MSPA forums just started out as a place where Andrew Hussie posted stupid pictures he made with text to go along with them, and a few of his internet and rl friends would post suggestions. And a couple years later we have Homestuck. Who knows what we could accomplish.

I occasionally look around. I don't do much, however, because I don't really feel particularly 'invested' in the community. As in, I don't see much interesting stuff to post about, so I don't really post.

I do, however, think a new forum would be a bad idea. What would it accomplish? Isolating the few remaining users, not giving anyone a reason for any new people to join, making it so people who return out of curiosity simply get lost? What would a new forum do for the quite obviously stale community? If it goes to it, I'd help, but I see no real point.

I don't think making a new forum is a good idea either. Have any of you seen the forum that replaced Eurospore? Here it is: http://lifeandgames.ipbhost.com/

Notice the severe lack of activity. I joined that forum, as did Puk, and posted a bit, but there really wasn't much going on. The community that had already been assembled in Eurospore didn't fully migrate over, and it was kinda impossible for that to happen anyway.

As regards what we can actually do, I was thinking organized gaming events for those of us on Steam. Delta and I play a lot of Hidden: Source, and I know some of you guys have tried it as well, but if we can get someone with enough computer power to set up a dedicated server for us... Hohoho, that would be fun. I also seem to remember us having a blast playing the Survival games, though admittedly a lot of us got tired of it. The thing I'd like most to do is have a Gelocity tournament, where we make a tournament ladder and face off 1-on-1 in multiple games. (Gelocity is a Portal 2 co-op map where the track is made of orange goo and you basically compete to be the biggest douche to the other person.) It's things like that that we can discuss and organize here then put into action in-game.

I agree that more game-related stuff should be going on (it is, after all, the forum's origin). What we need, however, are lots of events that cover a broad range of people so everyone has something to do. That's difficult.

I don't really have time for any gaming stuff. I don't have steam, nor do I play a lot of minecraft. That stuff just eats up too much of my time that I could spend doing other things.

If that's what other people are interested in, though, then just go for it I guess.

Gelatino95 wrote:

That stuff just eats up too much of my time that I could spend doing other things.

.....such as?

Anyway, here's some of my ideas.

For one, we need more threads where people can discuss common interests, such as maybe a thread reguarding Steam Gaming, Spore (if anyone still plays it), hamsteak, stuff like that.

Secondly, we could also have some contests. Remember back when we used to have caption contests?

Kitty wrote:

Gelatino95 wrote:

That stuff just eats up too much of my time that I could spend doing other things.

.....such as?

Oh god, I just realized how condescending that sounded

FYI everybody I no longer go out of my way to be a jerk all the time. That was back when I used SPPf, where being a jerk was pretty much the norm. I later realized that SPPf is probably the absolute worst waste of time possible, so I just stopped posting there.

Anyway, ever since I realized that I'm going to die someday, I started spending my time more productively. I started prioritizing my homework even more, especially since I started taking a crapload of AP courses. I also mentioned how I'm writing a comic that's still regularly updating, and I like to devote a lot of my time to that. I try to avoid activities that don't bear any fruit, like posting on forums. I mostly use MSPA forums just for my comic.

By the way, if any of you want to read it I have it hosted here.

In a nutshell, I just try to cram as much awesome stuff into my life so that someday when I'm an old dude I can look back and tell myself that I had a pretty awesome life. And frankly, I'm probably not going to remember all the posts I make here when I think of that.

I'm kinda here. Sometimes...

Quote :

Are you still there...?

Yes.

Whilst I think making a new forum is a bad idea, I find it very hard to keep calling this place the GAC. Seeing as hardly anyone even plays Spore anymore.

Like a few other people, I do lurk. I check the forum more than once a day for that matter; yet I still have nothing I can really post about. :<