The Think Tank

This is a rather lengthy post… I know people don't want to take 20 minutes to read one post, but if you want to know how YOUR forum has been working read on…

Don't lose hope my friends, we have gotten a lot from your energy in the forum.  I did a little research and went through the entire “Share your creative ideas …that could be implemented in AChat” topic (I know… I have too much time on my hands) and here is what I've come up with:

There have been 277 unique suggestions made concerning everything from body styles to background music to poses and everything in between.  From those 277 suggestions 114 have been implemented.  That is 41%.  I don't know how long the forum has been here, as the earliest post I can find is by Tom on March 18, 2009, but to get 41% implementation is extraordinary.  Now, we all know some of the updates were already in the works before the suggestion was made but I still think it's great.

If I was on the Dev-Team and was looking through the forum for suggestions, the “Share your creative ideas…that could be implemented in AChat” category would be the only category that I would read.  It is the only one that has the wording “Discussions about AChat” as its category sub title, so that is where I would look for ideas and suggestions… and I would only read the “[IDEAS] For your Favorite _____” (fill in the blank).  I mean, as a Dev-Team member, I got code to write, I don't have time to read the entire forum.  The rest of the forum would be for you people to play in to your heart's content.

One of the problems I saw for the Dev-Team was wading through all the posts to find the suggestions.  I know this is a sore spot for some, I read the Forum Etiquette 101 topic, but put yourself in the Dev-Team's place.  They're using the Forum as a “Think Tank” (great term TightFit) to get ideas that members want, but they had to go through page after page of who was going to do what to whom and why, and post after post of “I really like this, too”, until they found something useful.  So whoever came up with pinning the [IDEAS] For your Favorite ______ (fill in the blank) hit one out of the park.

As of this writing there are 594 Topics and 19,136 posts in the “Share your creative ideas” category and out of that 277 posts are unique suggestions and 208 posts are repeated suggestions (the suggestion had already been made).  That leaves over 18,500 posts that were meaningless to the Dev-Team.  So I think it's remarkable what they have been willing to do to get the ideas from the “Think Tank” that is the forum.

I got this from the Announcements category under Client Upgrades:  38 updates from March 18, 2009 until March 8, 2010.  That is just 10 days short of a full year.  These updates included many things that were asked for, and some of them included multiple updates with poses and clothing.  I don't know how the forum was set up earlier, but it looks like things got moved around, so I cannot find much information to other updates.

Another thing I don't know is when the updates changed from being once a week to twice a week.  In the short amount of time since I've been a member (since mid-March 2012) there has been 33 updates.  Think about that.  You have gone from 38 updates in a year to 33 updates in a little over 3 months.  Sure, some of them have been lame, but most of them (at least since I've been here) have been spectacular, such as the member clothing shop releases, which was first suggested by Tom in January, 2012 and Keiko's fashions went on sale in May.  Only 5 months from being an idea to implementation (that is fast).  The “Against the Wall” pose is another one.  Heck, Ms. Pafe asked for bunny ears and got them in a couple of weeks.

Also, while going through the “Share your creative ideas category“, I made note of the suggestions for improving the forum.  Here are the numbers for that:  20 suggestions, with 8 implementations and 2 repeated suggestions… again, that's 40%, which is pretty darned good, if you ask me.

So take heart fellow board junkies… your hard work here has paid off handsomely and I for one would like to thank everyone who has ever posted for their efforts to make AChat a better experience for everyone.  And I would especially like to thank the Dev-Team for all their hard work in making our dreams come true.

Covems