Staredit Network

It's ranting time.

One of the things I really hate about the internet, is signing up for things I don't feel the need to.

As taken from example from sites like starcraft.org, sclegacy, battle.net forums, and staredit.net, you'll notice, you can view the full extents of the website without having to fill in forms, expose your personal information and so on.

Staredit.net was created to help other mappers. Which is why, viewing tutorials, searching on forums, downloading files/maps, reading posts, and so on, requires no account here. In fact, if you loggout, you'll notice that the only thing you can't do is submit anything.

This is for a good reason. We want people to have accounts to verify them and track them via their account and see their submittions and data. It is far more difficult to track people via cookies or something like that, as they can be cleared and such and such.

I notice with many websites I go to, a lot of examples can be found in the advertising forum, that websites like to "withhold" forums to view, or content to see. They want people to sign up. I personally think its selfish, and I typically get annoyed by this kind of stuff because I really don't want to have an account, I just want to see the website.

Signps take like 5 minutes out of my time, sure, but its something I hate doing. You think to yourself, why are they holding back? Why do I have to sign up to see things?

I'm hoping if you're running a website or forum, you take this into serious consideration. I'm not the only one whos annoyed by signing up constantly.

Most of the time people do it to force people to post or visit more often, or so they think. For every site I actually DO sign up for when forced to, I usually end up being extremely disappointed and I always never come back. "Begging for members and signups" as some people call it is constant whoring of new visitors to sign up. Yes, there are some appealing features sometimes for when you sign up, but don't only make them so people sign up. Make the features for everyone when possible.

You end up having 10,000 member accounts of people who actually bothered to sign up and only 25 of those people are actual returning visitors.

Please, don't force people into signing up.

Thank you.

Please give me your opinions, rebuttles, or whatever else.

I agree, and how many people sign up for SeN and never come back, even though they don't have to?

I hate signing up just to get a download, or a skin that I want, it is very annoying, I go through the process a lot, and is really making me made. I agree with you on this.

Anoyying indeed, especialy on fileplanet. I want ONE download and you gotta go through like 5 or more pages of forms then you gotta find the download again!

It's especially annoying when you want to download free software. If it's free in the first place, then why make me go through a bunch of annoying sign up pages and then get stupid emails from their affiliates?

I think it's all about the numbers. I believe that when a site is looking for sponsers, they probably know that they have a better chance of picking one up if they can show they have a bagillion members instead of only a handful of loyal ones.

I was a guild master on WoW for a few months and at first I just wanted a good number of members. But after awhile, I got sick of having over 200 people to keep track of when only about 30 of them actually logged in regularly. I eventually made a policy that would boot anyone that was logged out for more than 2 weeks. Membership went down to between 60-70, but it just felt better in the end.

This is something I see a lot of. Even with my forums I hide some of the topics, posts, even forums.

It doesn't really help, nor does it make people want to join. The guests come in to check out the whole site, see topics, posts people make, and more. If you block them from that you shouldn't expect members like SEN or anything else.
(Guests should have the right to view all forums, posts, topics, but be limited to posting in something like, pointless forum).

I'm sure guests dont even mind the forum with "Guests Register!" and the reasons why.

Thats my part

well yea there are to many members in here that arent doin anything.
this is mostly just wasting space.

There are about 300 members who visit daily (we can estimate that about 1000 accounts are actually still used on a regular basis when submitting maps and such), and many more guests who don't bother to make accounts. We get about 2000 daily uniques right now. I don't have an approximation on how many guests visit though.

I don't delete accounts because some people end up returning after a while. I frankly don't care if they just sit there and thats not what this topic is about.



The question is then, why do you do it? It isn't some "secert thing" which motivates people to register, it actually demotivates people because "register first sites" are usually hiding that they have nothing of interest to offer people.

i didnt say delete the accounts but is there a way to suspend the accounts so the website has more room?
like the members that are comming back has to go to their email and reactivate it or something.

They do it because they want people to give back to the community. For example, comment on the download they got from the site. Ever here the expression there's no such thing as a free lunch? While technically the hidden parts of the forum maybe free, it doesn't mean they appreciate people burning bandwidth by not actually saying anything.

In some cases you're absolutly right, like if there's no way to post anything other than downloads on the site, who gives a ****? That doesn't happen often.

As far as whoring members go, you're just as guilty as they are by allowing destructive, non-contributing members to stay here. But I guess what qualifys as destructive is a matter of opinion.

I believe it's perfectly resonable to want people taking from you (free services you provide) to give a little back (comments, suggestions etc.).

yeah seriously, lets have a poll, how many accounts are active how many are not

One of the things that forces people to sign up for SEN, is that you are not allowed to comment on maps or files unless you sign up for SEN.
I also think guests should be allowed to post in map making assistance, another thing which makes people sign up, post once, then leave.

DeviantART is run so that nonmembers can view its main content- Art and user pages, etc, but they can't comment on the work, or access areas such as the chat feature or download extensions to change the skins.

However, in order to use certain features, being a member isn't enough. Membership is free, but if you pay you get bigger thumbnails, a more interactive community message center, etc. And to get even more features, you gotta check the Beta Tester option. This builds up an unpleasent caste system. There are many members who have never paid that have exceptional artwork, but the members who do paid are seemingly held in a higher respect on the forums and in the chat. Half the website is based around community- community projects, clubs, etc.

What really sucks is that I paid for a new subscription, and it turns out I'm supporting the evil nemisis of all that is right and yellow--Jark. Frickin dumb Angelo...*rants bitterly*

In short, I agree with you partially, yoshi. Members shouldn't have to register to view the content. However, they should have to register to comment on or submit content, as a way of tracking who abuses the site, etc.

You're actually completly agreeing with him =P Notice how posting on SEN works?

I don't see the point in this. A better solution would be for me to put a new counter "accounts that have been active in the past month" to get a more accurate estimate of active people. There is no point in punishing people for not logging in.



You don't even know what whoring members IS. Here, I'll give you an example site (I'm sorry to be picking on this guy, but he installed this mod and I gotta use him as an example) click here

If you were here 1.5 years ago, you'd see that I would actually take action against "destructive" members. I don't have time to waddle through 1,000 posts a day carefully analyizing every word someone says. I most of the time end up skimming through stuff. You KNOW I take action when someone reports it, and you obviously are noticing "destructive" members, so why don't you stop :censored:ing and PM me about it? It's the number one way to fix problems, you can ask anyone. I tend to be a lot more reponsive when people report things to me, because it enables me to determine people who are causing trouble for others, instead of going through billions of posts.

ADDITION:

But when you force people to sign up for accounts, they're there for the file. They don't go "Oh well, since I got an account I might as well leave a comment". It just doesn't work that way

ADDITION:

Read my post above carefully please.
It also prevents imposters.

ADDITION:
I'm not saying signing up is a bad thing. I'm talking about forced signups for mainstream content on a website. Things like comments and submitting comments is ALWAYS better to have accounts in those situations.

I've got an excellent method for bypassing all those pesky mandatory registration sites, it can be found at www.bugmenot.com , I simply love that site, it even has a firefox plugin so you can choose the option "bugmenot" when you hit a password box to have it autofill an account and log you in. If this is against the rules yoshi, just tell me and I'll take it down, but I personally think its awesome.
addition: Whoa, links stopped working, thats odd...
Addition2: Ok, looks like his host pulled the plug on it, but apparently the site will be rehosted within a few days on another host.

Nah, its a-okay for autofillin stuff.

What do you think the people who offered the service are thinking? I think it might be something along the lines of "I don't care that you had to sign up just for one thing, I'm not doing this for people like you". At least, the guy who was complaining about signing up for a German site to get a download.


I wasn't aware there was a formal definition, no. As far as I'm concerned, it's keeping unneccessary members (probably with the goal of looking more popular than you actually are).

You whine about devilesk on battle.net everytime I see you both on saying things like "I'm really starting to dislike you". If he's a douche then ban him, it's not like he's any better on SEN. Use your MODs like advisers if you care about not looking like you're whoring members. If you truly don't care what those little numbers say, that's fine.

I do report things, there's no immidiate (immidiate as in, when the MOD see's it they do more than up warn) punishment.

I never asked you to do that. I don't remember even implying it. I realise you're not omnipotent. I refer only to the actions I've seen you take on members who break the rules.








I guess I must have down syndrome or something, because to me these mean the same thing.

PS: Your site is fine as it is, but you're complaining about other sites that you aren't really any better than.

If the webmaster isn't there to offer people something, then they shouldn't have a website. People who prioritize memberships over service is plain wrong and annoying, which is the point of my whole rant.


Oh, thats totally different. I don't care to delete members, but thats totally unrelated in this matter.

Actually, he was recently suspended from this website, and I'm working with cheeze to blamlist him from the channel (it took a long time because no ones running the bot and im having trouble with the bot hashes). So, in that example action was already taken a few days ago. He was blamlisted before, but for some reason it was undone. I don't know why.

I meant, PM things to me. I have more power and more say over what the mods do and think, and so I can take better and more pwnage action against people.


Don't worry, I like debates, and I didn't say I'm better, I said the fact that sites don't have registrations for viewing content is better.

When I did that, I was only concentrating on my number of members. Until you explained to me the 'member' stuff

Now I don't really care about my ammount.

can yall actually seperate the member list to the active and inactives?
OR....
you know when a person is unregistered and it says it around the box or where ever it is. can you make a sign that says InAcTiVe or something like that.
would it be to complicated?

Oh well, I'll say it for you then. SEN is better run than most websites out there, even "professional" ones.

That depends if the person offering the service is intending to improve upon it, possibly for his or her own benifits.

Lets say I post a tune of me playing acoustic guitar on a forum. Further suppose I don't have much interest in just letting people enjoy it (because I'll have no idea if they really are). Now everyone who just downloads it and doesn't say anything (they could possibly claim they made it elsewhere, post/reproduce it without my permission etc.) I've now gained nothing. However, by encouraging comments and suggestions (which for reasons of forum security that you've mentioned, can only be accessed by signing up) I can improve on the tune, and better myself (the reason I probably posted it).

To me, it's not important to let people who don't intend to comment at all download the tune. Obviously this could apply to many services. The visitor gets the benifit of the service, I hope for the benifit of criticism.

I'm a fairly cynical person when it comes to taking risks (asuming people aren't going to bother getting an account and telling me what they think if they've already heard the song), I think most of society is (hence forcing user sign in to avoid abuse). Hell, 15+ people won't even bother to tell a blind man a hurricane is coming. Why should I risk it?

On the other hand, when a site already has many frequent visitors, it's less important to be so carful (unless of course it's important to you not to allow you service to spread too much).

That's where I stand =/