My thoughts, if you don`t mind...
Why not bring the search function to a "relevant level" in the first place?
Why not get someone/sometwo-or-three plow through the forum threads and extract the needed and useful information scattered here?
Planetside sees this forum as part of a official Help-function, if I am not misunderstanding?
Provide me with a complete download of this forum and I`ll start right away.
I hate to think because of missed opportunity and unwillingness this wealth of information will be lost.
Remember the new "Function Nodes in Practice" area? What a missed opportunity in how it is set up.
To be honest I gave up understanding what and what not I was/am allowed/supposed to ask/post there...
Did it fill up with info and "Function Nodes in Practice" examples? I don`t know.
I lost interest because it was not nurtered by the initiators.
Make the Wiki a more relevant place to go to and fill it with tutorials - the info is in the forum
(scattered, yes, but this happens naturally without moderation and some work on the part of the forum owner)
Someone has to boil it down.
Since the VFX videos are up, the place here will be even less frequented with new life.
New users get there questions answered in the videos, long time users know all of that already (more or less).
Most of the new users who occasionally pop up here are used to facebook and other formats I presume - not to a forum.
Of course they leave again soon after they took a look...it`s much slower in here and the layout of a forum software
is likely not fit for a smartphone, I guess.
So, I wonder why open up another layer of information with a chatroom where the information will be hidden and scattered like it is here?
You have the facebook stuff for that already. Or does it not work that way?
A lot of questions asked by new users point in the direction of game engines.
Does Planetside react to that here or in the Wiki? Nope.
Are you long standing experts using TG in Game Engines? Nope (at least not that I noticed).
Why would they stay here? There`s nothing here for those people.
The post is already unbearably long for you, I think. So I write down my last words for now:
I personally think/fear that this chat would be more of an expert chat where non-experts won`t be participating.
Often the topics which were created over the last few month are so above non-expert-hobbyist-occasional-user-knowledge-level
that they were not really interesting for the before mentioned group - like me. Way above my head.
I could not even imagine how to participate in such a chat. So, this would not be for me.
In short, if the forum does not get streamlined, cut-down to useful and relevant info, split into old and new -
then rather take the whole user interaction to Social Media and have it focused there.
CHeers, Klaus