I've been member of a forum for such a long time and I enjoyed my stay here. But at this point I must conclude that UK LR is slipping away. First the dutch section was wrecked and now the UK section is going down fast speed.

Prominent users stop posting, reponse to topics are bad, content is below zero. All these things give me bad vibes.. Sure I could just leave aswell and maybe join another forum.. But is also happens in other forums! Maybe is just because of the summer you think. That's true at some point, but in general I see al kind of internet communities go down.

Do you share this fealing and what could be the cause? Could it be the internet hype allready reached his peak and people are blaze. Is it that new generation only want to leech and are not willing to give. Is it because we are getting more police on the internet. What do you think?

I agree with this completely, the living room is nothing like as interesting as it used to be.

I think alot of random topics where exhauseted, I don't post 1/10 what I used to, this probably has increased the LR quality slightly anyway.

I guess IRC died ages ago (going by #cdfreaks-int, never been much on #cdfreaks), used to have 20+ users posting at almost any time, now its unusual to find anybody on there at all. Maybe the same has happened to the LR?

Ben

There are lots of factors I guess.
Summer probably plays its part, after all, who wants to be stuck indoors when the weather is good.

The amount of people visiting the forum is high; The LR regularly has 100+ people viewing the forum. We can’t however make people participate.

Topics do become tired, and yes many topics which I would consider interesting do tend to end up going bad. Other ones just don’t attract people to post as they used to.

Maybe this is a good opportunity to express an opinion on what you think is good and bad about the LR.
But please don’t get personal and start flaming individual members.

Over the last week or so even I haven't been posting as much in here.

I agree that Summer is probably playing a part in it. The World Cup too?

I too have noticed 100+ people viewing the LR quite a few times...

What I like about the Living Room:

It's a relaxed place to hang out, people are usually having fun, being off-topic is not considered a bad thing, I get to enjoy other people's wacky humour (and vice versa), I get to see people's less serious and less technical side and show them mine.

What I don't like about the Living Room:

There are some completely and utterly pointless and boring threads that just don't want to die - fortunately I can just ignore those threads.

Threads occasionally go bad because peoples religion, political views, patriotism, or some other personal subject is attacked and people's feelings get hurt.

Sometimes it's better to keep your mouth shut, even if you're 100% certain that you are right, if the only outcome of speaking your mind is that somebody else will get hurt.

i aggree with drage in the feelings bit.

The truth, in my case at least is that I only help when its a quick answer and the answer hasnt been given before. I then feel that the person should do a search. An example of this is 'my dvd writer is burning too slow'. DMA, IDE cable, is the rest of the comp doggy doosh, defrag? Etc etc. If the answer is so blatantly easy to search for then i just dont bother answering. Only when i have had personal experience do I contribute to peoples questions.

On the blaze' side of things, i also aggree with this. The other day, i happened to click on the 'what country has tue ugliest woman' and thought hmm, wonder what ppl think and decided to add my thoughts. Otherwise i only really contribute to the scans threads for the writers i own. I also like to browse the general hardware section.

End of o.t.

Yeah, i aggree, some threads in the living room need to be put in the bin, just because they;ve been there for too long. I wonder if the moderators should converse with eachother and create threads that they perceive to be interesting and engaging for everyone. I know that i wont create threads there just because I find that the more 'popular' members get more views lol. I can see a thread i made dying within 10 posts.

Yo-

Personally believe that when the "Games Up" area was started - that seemed to be a moral blow to the people (like me) that were truely having fun and participating with each other - now topics like "The Person Above" have five day gaps in postings - whereas it never had five hour gaps in postings-eh!

I know that I and a whole lot of others are not posting as much as they used to - probably 'cause the fun is gone due to very apparent tight assed administrative moves here in the Living Room-eh!

Mike

I agree with Drage on most all feelings on the LR. It's fun to see the funny side of people. You can always find something to make you laugh, sometimes so hard your stomach hurts for days. The world is a very tense place lately and we all need a place to take a break from reality. There are some members that seem a little to uptight at times and are easily offended by things that were not meant to offend anyone. You need to take most things in life with a grain of salt, same with the LR.
Wobble

i admit that i dont post much in here anymore..guess the topics are beaten to death or just not worth the effort to respond ......

I've been in here sometimes when there was nano seconds between posts not the case now...some are days and even weeks....

This is pretty depressing stuff. I agree with Mike. Once the games sub forum was created, everything went down the crapper so to speak. I've been busy with a prospective gf for the past couple weeks so that's my excuse for sucking as of late. Hopefully everything picks up sometime soon...

You gotta admit that it was getting way out of hand. Probably my own fault as well. CdFreaks deciscion to split up the living room to a normal and wacky part was a very sane deciscion to do i think.


Err, why is that a bad thing?

And perhaps they have other things to do?

There was a lot more activity before the "police" were called in...maybe because it used to be fun to stay connected here for the looney stuff that went on between serious posts. A number of those who were blamed for the LR excesses were also extremely helpful in the other forums.
Now they are not here so often anymore.
Sad.

101 users online, no new posts for at least an hour (5 in the main lr forum and 5 in the games forum)

For what it's worth, I agree with Mike, Deanimator, and Wazzy

There is sooo few of the good old "why do I fart when I drink Guiness"threads these days....

I just want to mention that we recognize this problem and will try to discuss what we can do about this. It's very important for us that we get a lot of feedback so that we can pinpoint the real problem and work on a solution. From what I gather here there are mainly two things coming up:

• Same topics all over again, time for new ones!
• The games up forum spoiled the fun
• - any point you feel should belong here, post in this thread! -

If I summarized it well, then I'd love to know what we could do to improve it. E.g. why is the games up forum not a good replacement for the threads we had? How can we stimulate new topics, and what kind of topics would you like to see?

Greg also talks about a 'barrier' for creating new threads which makes me wonder if new people have the feeling there is a 'hardcore clique' here where it's hard to get in between or if they feel the same that popular people get more views? If that's then the case then please let us know (Dee's, Arachne's or my PM is also there if you don't want to speak out in public).

We do need your help in order to make it better! Also thanks to Marz for having the courage to start this thread and thanks to the others for replying and not giving up on us that easily! We are dedicated to make this the best possible place of our members, after all it's our users who make CD Freaks to what it is!

Yo-

Now this is a prime example of the good leadership that we have been accustomed to in the past and is a breath of fresh air that it still exists-

Thank you for getting involved and sincerely wanting input from the members-

I have had my say earlier in this thread - so any further comment from me would be regurgitated information - but I encourage others to speak up and tell the administration what you truely feel-eh!

Mike

what i've found is that some people are a bit over opinionated, they know better than you about things or what happened, (not that i'm saying i know a lot) but it put's me off posting back.

I have also noticed some stronger opinions the discouage me from posting (not worth the trouble to pick a fight). Of couse considering I usally a drunken dumbass when I post in here, maybe I deserve it. Fyi, drinking tonight, give me a few hours to drink to the dumbass level and start posting (maybe). Hopefuly I wont make a complete idiot out of myself (yet again).

I've noticed this also. Some people don't come here to discuss things. However stupid some of these things can be, they can be fun. Some seem to come to just to see if they can start a fight. It's kinda like watching TV, if you don't like what's on just change the channel.
Reading a post by ripit after he's had a few can be great fun in itself. Besides, if he leaves it sitting around for too long the little people that live in his computer drink it (nothing worse than a bunch of drunk little people inside your HD)

Just wanted to pop in and say that each and every contribution to this thread is being taken onboard - input from you guys is very important, if we had no input, we'd have no idea what you guys want from the LR.

Any more ideas would be good!

Hi
Definately the decision to fragment LR & setup Game's up has affected the "freedom" that some members had come to expect. Not really interested in the why's & wherefore's, just an observation. This judging by PM's & emails sent to me coincided with what can only be described as an attempt to control/intimidate user's by a handful of members (no not Mods, just everyday members). This often took the form of gang posting when a member (quite often newbie) made an error. Someone would highlight this in a condescending & often hostile way. With others joining in. This is an area that could/should be addressed by Mods. In fairness this does happen on some occassions & I'm sure that Mods can't be everywhere all the time. After all we're supposed to be fairly responsible. However I do know of several members leaving all together, while others have taken more of back seat. As result of these events. Whilst it can be irritating when some of these posting errors occur. I would like to point out that were it not for forums like this, then we'd all still be in the dark. So let's not forget ourselves & get back to being a community.
BTW The time of year obviously is a factor too.
Have a good one everyone.

Hi all
I must admit that I'm one of those people that has taken a back seat with this forum, but for me it's been that my real life has commanded too much of my time for quite a while now, but when I get chance then I do look in to see what's going on.
I think it's not just the LR thats lost interest to many but CDFreaks.com as a whole.
Back in the day (oh here he goes ) when I first started coming here the CD burning scene was huge, complicated and frankly scary for a nooby. There were about 5-6 major burning applications all vying for your business and each one had their fan base on CDFreaks.
News, products, hacks, workrounds and reviews were coming out on an almost hourly basis it seemed and around that this forum sort of glued everything together, pointed people in the right place to get their stuff working and lots of people made new and interesting online friends.

Nowerdays it's totally changed. Every new computer has a DVD burner, Windows, MacOS, Linux and many others can nativley burn CDs and DVDs without the user needing any prior knowlage of what to do (hands up if you had to install an ASPI layer on a mates computer recently?) and as a result a lot of companies have moved away from what we support and cover news on.
This leads to less coverage, less stuff to talk about and just the same people (as nice as you all are ) hanging around, so yeah the new posts and replies to old ones will dry up a bit, just in the same way as with anyone you live with I suppose.

I'm I taking about the death of CDFreaks as we know it? Of course not. There are a lot of forums out there that would bite their right arm off to have this amount of people on their books, but maybe the focus of this thread to the LR should really be widended to the whole site. Does anyone else thing our coverage should widen to cover other subjects to attract new and fresh members? Are we as a community doing everything we can to promote this site? Should we all make an effort submit news articles and make new main news page look like something is actually happening? Should we react to these articles when we do have a point of view on it apart from skipping to the next one?

Or have I totally lost the plot and have no real idea what's going on?

Too many political/religious discussions for me these days. I won't be coming around much anymore.

But that's why there are other sub-forums under "CD Freaks Living Room" and there are also quite a lot of technical forums just a few mouse-scrolls away.

I don't see why and how CDFreaks LR is being killed. The only real difference between now and year 2001 I can be sure of is that there are more visitors than ever.