Creators Should Never Read Their Forums

Well, I'll be, Spiderweb Software on HN.<p>Just so you guys know, this is a lifestyle business he's been running for, like, 15 years. You should definitely check out his games if you like retro RPGs.<p>Just some more background. His situation is really a little different than most game makers with respect to the forums, and I'll tell you why:<p>A long time ago (like '90s long ago) he released a game creation system called Blades of Exile, based on the IP of a commercially successful trilogy he had released. A small but very active and very vocal community built up around this specific product. They had a lot of demands for bugfixes and feature enhancements in this product, to which Jeff was not particularly receptive (especially the latter), since he preferred to focus on writing and selling new games rather than extending a game creation system for free.<p>This created some ill will with the Blades of Exile community (but not the larger Spiderweb Software community) and it was also true that a lot of the Blades of Exile luminaries considered themselves _better game makers than Jeff himself_ and did not hesitate to insult, not only Jeff's games, but _fans_ of Jeff's games on the Spiderweb forums.<p>The Blades folks all hung out in the Spiderweb forums, and they _stayed_ there, loudly insulting Jeff and complaining bitterly that he wasn't interested in maintaining Blades, and loudly asserting that their creations surpassed anything Jeff had ever done, for _years_. Eventually he just open-sourced the damn thing, but it kind of poisoned the forum dynamics for a long time. He's actually sworn off of creating another game creation system ever again, because dealing with the communities surrounding them and their maintenance requests is more trouble for less money than cranking out a good RPG every year.<p>So, in his case, he really is right: he had a small group of vocal customers who were basically attacking him to<p>1. Get him to put in free work on Blades<p>2. Establish their own artistic credibility<p>and this bunch wasn't representative of most of his paying customers.

Umm. I completely disagree. I was part of a 2 man team that started up 4 years ago, (a game) and I made the forums and built that community up to nearly 1,000,000 users.<p>Sure, you might get angry, or you mightn't like what people say - but it's the Internet. If people are saying bad things, you're doing something wrong. More times than not, we got people saying "Thanks", and this was worth more than 100+ people complaining.<p>It also helps build the community. A developer comes swooping down on a thread talking about "how cool would it be to have water in game?!" and goes, "Well, you seem to know what you're talking about... how about I make you moderator and you can sort out anything there is to do with water in game". Works wonders. The users love the fact that you interact with them. I.e. you're not too busy to stoop down to them.

I'm going to agree with this because I've seen the comments on Notch's (Minecraft dev) blog. Commenting has been turned off now but they ranged from praise to demands for features and fixes to outright rage that they're not being listened to. Charge (a cut-price amount) for your product and you're somehow indebted to your users forever.

The author is slightly confusing cause with effect here. Not reading your forums <i>makes</i> them toxic since there is no effective moderation. Too many people still have this misguided notion that the Internet should be some massive free speech zone where nothing can be censored except maybe spam. Nothing could be further from the truth.<p>Clear, effective moderation backed up by sensible but stringent policy can remove many of the pathologies that the article is talking about and transform a forum into a genuinely useful resource.

I disagree. I was part of the three-person team that created Libranet 3 (a commercial Linux distribution) years ago. Every member of the company kept active contact with the community via the forums and mailing list. This created a sense of community, and gave good insights into what our customers expected.<p>Of course, every now and then a troll or disgruntled customer would appear. They can be truly poisonous to you and the community. And the tricky part is distinguishing 'disgruntled, but insightful' people from 'sour, and unproductive' people. If necessary we sometimes had to apply force and ban the user.<p>But if you make an good product, the group of happy and contributing community members is at least two orders of magnitude larger than poisonous people.<p>Of course, it is very well possible that game forums attract a whole different class of people those of a commercial Linux distribution.

Politicians have the same problem.<p>The last people you should listen to are the ones that are the most vocal, yet the only information you get comes from those very people.<p>Same with the forums - if you listen to the suggestions there you are listening only to the most vocal, but those are not necessarily the ones with the best advice/suggestions.<p>The problem with the most vocal is that usually those are also the ones who care the most - but they care about themself. And they care about themself a lot - that's why they are so vocal.

I ask for feedback sometimes in my forum, and over the years the responses have gotten worse and worse.<p>There are a few core responders who have great ideas and are a big help. The rest (who are becoming the majority) don't read anything at all and just scream out that I need to add X, Y and Z.<p>At first, I tried to debate them, but that's a complete waste of time. Instead, just engage with the ones who are useful and do your best to ignore the buzzing of the rest.

This is the general problem of listening to a million people. Maybe a HN-like or a Slashdot-like software solution would let one delegate the filtering to the community itself?<p>There's also UserVoice who claim that they solve this problem, but I am not sure how well they perform.