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I know reviews are sometimes posted there, but not everyone has time to leave detailed reveiws - if people can instead post their top 5 new original scripts (Shorts, features or even the first 10 pages for features) to highlight those that they think stand above the rest. that can be a post on the main site which might attract filmakers to look at the scripts highlighted.
We´ve actually had that too. The problem seems to be that not as many people read scripts anymore unless they know the writer is an active member.
Not trying to be negative or anything. Just chiming in with my thoughts.
If you Google free scripts, or un-produced scripts this site is always listed near the top of results. So, I think it has a decent presence.
Guess we also have a different view of "quiet". There's a healthy amount of new scripts every day and newbies come at a pretty stable flow - 10 new members so far this month.
Where I see it as "quiet" isn't on new members or media presence - it's on participation. I joined the site five years ago. Maybe I'm being nostalgic (although not sure 5 years qualifies for nostalgic), but the comments then seemed to be script heavy - i.e., most the comments were on scripts rather than topics. Other than the OWCs - it seems to be the inverse today. Scripts get little attention and topics - like this one - get the bulk. Post something about how to use asides and the comments blow up, etc.
I can't speak for others, but I have been less "quiet" on reviews as opposed to when I first started because:
- Writers often don't respond - so why bother.
- A lot of my reviews/comments are now done via PMs.
- The scripts are far worse than when I first started. At least to my eyes. Can't count the number of times I've opened something and it was so far off the grid format wise that I thought - well, if they didn't give a shit about Googling how write a basic scene heading - why should I bother reading? Or perhaps I am just getting older and crankier.
So, if topics rule the day - then maybe we could generate noise by having a monthly or bi -monthly or whatever topic (e.g., Save the Cat, Unfilmables, Best Sci-fi of all time, etc. etc.).
Couple months back, there was a new member named Kevin S trying to get involved. No one would give him the time of day. I PM'd him and suggested he do a bunch of reviews. And so he did just that, reviewing a whole bunch of shorts in the 5 week challenge thing. He's still lurking, messaged me recently even though I only pop in occasionally. Unless I missed it, all of his reviews were ignored. At no point was he offensive. He just wasn't in the club, and the truth is it's not at all easy to get into the club. That's why activity is down. Older members move on, but it's not easy for newer members to feel welcome.
Dustin will say something like, well, no one's holding the door for you, you either have the balls to push your way in or you don't. And he'd be correct.
But if you really want more activity, you have to consider the experience of newbs exploring the forum. That has nothing to do with reformatting the place. It's a matter of recognizing newbs and being a bit less cliquey.
Couple months back, there was a new member named Kevin S trying to get involved. No one would give him the time of day. I PM'd him and suggested he do a bunch of reviews. And so he did just that, reviewing a whole bunch of shorts in the 5 week challenge thing. He's still lurking, messaged me recently even though I only pop in occasionally. Unless I missed it, all of his reviews were ignored. At no point was he offensive. He just wasn't in the club, and the truth is it's not at all easy to get into the club. That's why activity is down. Older members move on, but it's not easy for newer members to feel welcome.
Dustin will say something like, well, no one's holding the door for you, you either have the balls to push your way in or you don't. And he'd be correct.
But if you really want more activity, you have to consider the experience of newbs exploring the forum. That has nothing to do with reformatting the place. It's a matter of recognizing newbs and being a bit less cliquey.
1) Has Kevin posted his own work and not gotten reviews - or is it his comments on reviews that are ignored?
2) I think there is some merit to your point. Not sure what to do about it. (Newbie mentor program?)
Couple months back, there was a new member named Kevin S trying to get involved. No one would give him the time of day. I PM'd him and suggested he do a bunch of reviews. And so he did just that, reviewing a whole bunch of shorts in the 5 week challenge thing. He's still lurking, messaged me recently even though I only pop in occasionally. Unless I missed it, all of his reviews were ignored. At no point was he offensive. He just wasn't in the club, and the truth is it's not at all easy to get into the club. That's why activity is down. Older members move on, but it's not easy for newer members to feel welcome.
Dustin will say something like, well, no one's holding the door for you, you either have the balls to push your way in or you don't. And he'd be correct.
But if you really want more activity, you have to consider the experience of newbs exploring the forum. That has nothing to do with reformatting the place. It's a matter of recognizing newbs and being a bit less cliquey.
Not to mention the encouragment he got when he was asking if he could join the WT in round 2
So not really sure how he could be made to feel more welcome.
His WT reviews would have been ignored (IE not directly responded to, you have no idea if the writer took the comments onboard or not) - along with 99% of the others. There wasn't much time to respond to 20+ reviews for each entry in a 5 week tournament
Not to mention the encouragment he got when he was asking if he could join the WT in round 2
So not really sure how he could be made to feel more welcome.
His WT reviews would have been ignored (IE not directly responded to, you have no idea if the writer took the comments onboard or not) - along with 99% of the others. There wasn't much time to respond to 20+ reviews for each entry in a 5 week tournament
I check in on SS almost every day, though not as active as I was when I was a newb and I was was writing like five shorts a month! Those were the salad days for me - still new and so much to learn. It was fun and exciting and I enjoyed it immensely, and that was only five years ago but it seems like forever now. Weird.
I think we should all make a concerted effort to read more scripts, and I do think there might be something to the commenter who spoke of the site redesign and the shorts being categorized. I’ll admit i kinda liked it when it was more of a potpourri. Pot luck, everything lumped together.
And even five years ago we had some colorful characters here. Jeff doesn’t pop up nearly as much as he used to. There was others who would engage in arguments, threads that would go on forever that, admittedly, were just so damn fun to read. One even went on from night until early next morning - it was crazy. And more quickie challenges in between OWC’s. Stuff like that. That bracket thing we did last year was great because it pitted member against member, final elimination. That was a lot of fun! So new ideas are always welcome, as well as more participation.
I, for one, will start reading more. I’ve kind of fallen away from that a little and I miss it.
And I will also change my avatar to kinda mix things up a little.
Something simple. Beginning, middle, end. How did Moviepoet do it? Was it monthly?
2. A big RED button on the blog home page for the discussion board.
This is where all the magic happens anyway, and there's no easy way to find it.
3. A quid pro quo method of reviews.
You have to earn the right to get feedback on your script if you want it. Review a script to get a review. And it has to be at least a 100 word review. Not: "U R gud riter FTW!" It's frustrating when you take the time to review someone's work and all you get are crickets.
4. Copious amounts of cocaine for the OWC winners.
And hookers...just...in general...more hookers for everybody.
5. A landing page redesign.
It's just plain and not easy on the eyes. Someone on here must know of a quality web designer who will work for peanuts. Maybe we all chip in $5 to hire someone and we get a lifetime membership where our scripts are unlocked for review without first having to review other's scripts. Something like that.
6. I may hate myself for saying this...but a..."Like" button...ugh... I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. Create an easy way to show that I agree with someone's comment or script.
I pop in here every once in a while, but I have small children to tend to and apparently it's illegal to send them to the store at 1 in the morning to get smokes and Jagermeister, so that cuts into my writing time.
I feel that a monthly OWC has the potential to kill the OWC. It'll become the norm and boring and eventually die.
A 'like' button may help those who feel underappreciated. I've read a few comments where people feel they are being ignored.
There are free forum solutions like phpBB.. possibly more these days. I'm going back ten years at least. I'm pretty sure this BB would have been old even back then. This solution (E-Blah) may not be updated anymore and will be full of holes security-wise. However, who's heard of E-Blah before? All the hackers, script kiddies, pick on the top solutions like Vbulletin and IPB because the vulnerabilities in old software (and sometimes new) are available on Google.
However, if you did piss the wrong person off, they could do a search like this:
Finding that there is indeed a vulnerability here where somebody could possibly hack into the backend using something like SQL injection. You don't even need any hacking skills. Everything you need to achieve your aim is Googlable and you can even obtain free tools that will search a website's databases for vulnerabilities for you while you sleep. Once you get into the files then you can obtain things like hash keys for passwords. Run those through another free software program and boom, you have our passwords... no matter how complicated you've made them.
Like I said though, the script kiddies pick on the top solutions. This forum is relatively safe... meaning it's not likely to have some random. If somebody attacks this site, it's because they know it.
There are limits to what can be changed without having to export all the E-Blah data and setting up an entirely new board. There are instructions on the Web on how to export E-Blah data to more standard formats, but the site has a lot of uploaded files and links to externally hosted scripts and videos.
Security-wise, the most valuable thing on the site is the massive pile of IP in the scripts, and those are all public. There’s also the passwords (in case someone re-used their password on a bank site) and private messages (though I doubt anyone here PMs financially valuable information). No, the only reason someone would really want to hack SS is to infect the visitors with something like a keylogger, botnet client, or Bitcoin miner.
Dustin is probably right that the current software’s low profile offers a measure of protection (we won’t get caught up in those “One hundred eighty thousand Wordpress sites hacked” events), but if someone decides to target the producers who search the site, it wouldn’t be difficult. The SS server basically needs to make sure none of its HTML or Perl files get changed without authorization, but that’s true of any Web server and it happens anyway on an alarmingly regular basis.
Coming back to how this affects suggestions, E-Blah has certain features and it probably makes sense to keep suggestions within those bounds unless it’s worth migrating the whole site to something new, which takes a lot of effort and inevitably gets rewarded with users bitching about how things were better before. I don’t know why, but that always happens after a migration.
Yeah, that's very true. Everyone will be screaming for change... then, when change happens, they go quiet and the members that were quiet before scream about how much the change has ruined their entire experience of the site and they don't know if they're going to be able to visit any more.
Also, that vulnerability I pointed out may have been patched for this version of E-Blah, which is 9.71. I find it hard to believe though that there aren't more if the software isn't kept updated. It's likely that because the software is no longer kept updated that nobody has bothered looking for vulnerabilities.
In truth, I feel far safer with my account here than I do with companies like Amazon and Ebay. Even Google isn't completely safe.
There can be other problems associated with outdated software, like compatability issues, but I still use an old version of desktop Celtx on my Ubuntu 14 OS just fine.
It's all up to Don... migrating a forum like this should be fairly straightforward and fast as there are no image files. Most of the problems come from databases with large galleries, I've found. Just because of the amount of time it takes and the strain can sometimes crash the server. I'm also not sure that aesthetics is the problem... or that there is even a problem.
Yeah, I agree with Dave again and Steven. There is just not the same quantity of serious members who read, review and discuss scripts as before. That is the essence of what makes this site so great and unique.
Yet some thread about format will go on and on. Much easier to chime in about the proper use of an aside of course than read scripts and offer your thoughts.
And once again, I will never understand the high percentage of scripts that are dropped here with zero follow up.
E-Blah is basically a large collection of Perl scripts that run on a server. There's an Administration Center that Don can use to manipulate the options (it wasn't too long ago that the forum ranks were colors, now they're descriptive-ish). If these are actual options I wouldn't mind:
Some kind of thumbs-up on individual posts or threads (the thread-level star rating system has a bug in it).
Spoiler tags. It's like a quote block, but only the header portion is visible until a user clicks on it.
Full Unicode support, by which I mean not filtering out Unicode characters. Client Web browsers can render them even if E-Blah doesn't understand what they are. Probably won't be able to use them in the search bar, but that's not a big deal.
Better notification of new Private Messages.
Mucking around with the CSS and Perl underpinning the site allows for making new themes, adding new Smileys (though Unicode emojis give more bang for the buck), and possibly new features.
Making the forum more obvious from the homepage is a good idea. Making the homepage more obvious from the forum wouldn't hurt either.
Please move the introductions board to the top group.
And once again, I will never understand the high percentage of scripts that are dropped here with zero follow up.
There's a checkbox on the upload form to request feedback. Maybe this can be made more salient to the uploaders, as in telling them it implicitly promises they will interact with the reviewers?
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