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Post  yereverluvinunclebert Wed Dec 29, 2021 10:31 pm

I have a couple of groups on Deviantart that could become an official or semi official mouthpiece for BG

They are steampunk-artists

https://www.deviantart.com/steampunk-artists/gallery/

and the sister group

https://www.deviantart.com/steampunkartists/gallery/

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Post  Ottens Wed Dec 29, 2021 10:36 pm

mwbaaailey wrote:
Ottens said,
I tried to start a new forum called the Never Was Lounge in 2020, but it hasn't caught on.

Near as I can rememeber, this is the first I've heard of it. Is it OK to post on it, still?

Why, yes, of course!
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Post  J. Wilhelm Thu Dec 30, 2021 8:41 pm

yereverluvinunclebert wrote:I have a couple of groups on Deviantart that could become an official or semi official mouthpiece for BG

They are steampunk-artists

https://www.deviantart.com/steampunk-artists/gallery/

and the sister group

https://www.deviantart.com/steampunkartists/gallery/

That's one thing that intrigues me, Uncle Bert. How do you see traffic there? I have two accounts on DeviantArt (J-Wilhelm for the "business stuff" and Luftschiffengel for the personal / costuming stuff), but for me at least, it's a completely static repository of pictures. In many ways Pinterest is a far more active platform for me (also @Luftschiffengel)

Twitter is the only platform where I can hold conversations on a regular basis. Sometimes I get to expose topics in long threads (with some difficulty due to the format)
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Post  yereverluvinunclebert Thu Dec 30, 2021 11:30 pm

I don't worry about traffic, those communities had a several hundred members combined and there was another called design-addicts that I ran together. The steampunk community there was fairly vibrant. I stopped running them when the new theme/technology (Eclipse) made Deviantart run so slowly that it became a pain to use on the desktop.

The point is that something like that could act as art repository for a new BG. An arm of the new site on Deviantart. It is just an idea of the sort of thing that can be done to extend the reach of BG if it has to migrate to something like FaceBook.

In the same manner, BrassGoggles should definitely also have an official Facebook presence, to ignore that just because you don't like FB, is also a mistake.

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Post  J. Wilhelm Fri Dec 31, 2021 10:59 am

yereverluvinunclebert wrote:I don't worry about traffic, those communities had a several hundred members combined and there was another called design-addicts that I ran together. The steampunk community there was fairly vibrant. I stopped running them when the new theme/technology (Eclipse) made Deviantart run so slowly that it became a pain to use on the desktop.

The point is that something like that could act as art repository for a new BG. An arm of the new site on Deviantart. It is just an idea of the sort of thing that can be done to extend the reach of BG if it has to migrate to something like FaceBook.

In the same manner, BrassGoggles should definitely also have an official Facebook presence, to ignore that just because you don't like FB, is also a mistake.

One of the things I was trying to do toward the end of the Steampunk business was using frame based applications that could show pictures like a gallery and combine them with videos and other media (Rebel Mouse), in an embeddable format. Then I started using Pinterest, and it basically did the same without the capability for embedding. The thing is that those image-heavy applications are great to pull people to the source of the images.

You can link the images directly to the relevant website. The frame method is much more effective if the images are organized by topic, and a computer algorithm chooses how to distribute those pictures and to whom based on interests, such that they appear on someone else's feed without that person having to know you beforehand. Twitter is remarkably good at doing that, but Pinterest does the same in frame (gallery) format.

In the past I had determined through the use of counters that people are exactly 10 times more likely to end in your web page if the image has an embedded link, in contrast to providing an image and a separate link to the same page. Laziness and trust online are issues affecting incoming traffic.

I envision that the "blog" of the forum should take the form of a frame based platform like Pinterest, or an image heavy messaging format like Twitter. There's no point in having w blog as a gateway to the forum, because that only advertises you to those who already found you, not the people who don't know about you.

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Post  yereverluvinunclebert Fri Dec 31, 2021 1:44 pm

Well it's all moot until the remaining community create a quorum and start making decisions.

The first thing to do. I'm off now to do other things. If you need me you can contact me at Deviantart, J.Wilhelm. I'm yereverluvinuncleber there.

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Post  Ottens Fri Dec 31, 2021 4:22 pm

I would be happy to roll the Never Was Lounge into a new community and spearhead the technical aspects: domain, software installation, customization.

Ideally I would merge it with the Brass Goggles archive (the Never Was Lounge contains the archive of the Smoking Lounge steam- and dieselpunk community, which goes back to 2008) so nothing is lost while we launch something "new".

My proposal would be to coordinate this with other steam- and dieselpunk bloggers, webmasters and publications, so we get something of a critical mass.

Like SeVeNeVeS, though, I worry that what might happen is that Brass Goggles does reemerge in a while, the people in charge aren't willing to put the time and effort into joining forces with us to create something new, and members just return to there instead of whatever alternative we've built.
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Post  J. Wilhelm Fri Dec 31, 2021 4:49 pm

yereverluvinunclebert wrote:Well it's all moot until the remaining community create a quorum and start making decisions.

The first thing to do. I'm off now to do other things. If you need me you can contact me at Deviantart, J.Wilhelm. I'm yereverluvinuncleber there.

Agreed. And I won't do anything under the BG name unless I have a clear "mandate," for the simple reason that there's no support for using other platforms. Unfortunately this is a situation where falling back into a comfortable, familiar position does nothing but perpetuate the same problems. We're too small as we are and we need to increase our ranks.
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Post  J. Wilhelm Fri Dec 31, 2021 5:00 pm

Ottens wrote:I would be happy to roll the Never Was Lounge into a new community and spearhead the technical aspects: domain, software installation, customization.

Ideally I would merge it with the Brass Goggles archive (the Never Was Lounge contains the archive of the Smoking Lounge steam- and dieselpunk community, which goes back to 2008) so nothing is lost while we launch something "new".

My proposal would be to coordinate this with other steam- and dieselpunk bloggers, webmasters and publications, so we get something of a critical mass.

Like SeVeNeVeS, though, I worry that what might happen is that Brass Goggles does reemerge in a while, the people in charge aren't willing to put the time and effort into joining forces with us to create something new, and members just return to there instead of whatever alternative we've built.

On a Brassgoggles archive.. It depends on whether we can recover it at all! Im seeing very few cached webpages online and no sign of recovery or at least an FTP address for the server.

People need to want change first. I fear we're too passive. Doing anything with the Brassgoggles archive, though, requires an explicit written letter from the owners relinquishing control and intellectual rights, beside making Von Corax an administrator.

As It is, intellectual property is not in any of our hands, is it? I just don't want future trouble.


But starting something new is not under the control of older administrations...
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Post  Ottens Fri Dec 31, 2021 5:42 pm

We'd need to get an export file of the Brass Goggles (which will be used). Then I could import it into a new database under a new domain, and possibly convert it into a different format (if we change software) and merge it with another export file (like the archive of my Never Was Lounge).

I don't know about the intellectual property/copyright issues involved. As long as whoever owns Brass Goggles gives us written permission, shouldn't that be enough?

Again, though - as you rightly point out - this all depends on whoever owns/runs Brass Goggles anymore to actually show up.
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Post  The Corsair Sun Jan 16, 2022 12:57 pm

I hate to be the one to voice it, but is there some validity to the notion that our problems stem from Steampunk itself?

It certainly doesn't seem to have the same cultural momentum as it had in the early 2000's. We don't seem to get much fresh interest.

There are wider communities out there in theory, but a lot of them are more about the propagation of content than they are about interpersonal connections and having a place to 'hang out' like what we've tended to prefer.

I think we might be at the unfortunate confluence of the waning of Steampunk and the death of the internet forum.

That being said, I personally believe internet forums are the very thing those clamouring for an alternative to facebook are asking for. I do believe they'll have a resurgence, but then my question is will we survive until then?

If it's possible for us to get that critical mass of members then I say we give it 6 months and if there's no signs of BG returning then we set up something of our own (as has been discussed here already).

I do agree that converting folks from the wider steampunk diaspora on other sites is the way to go to ensure growth. The hard part will be that most of those places aren't really occupied by active individuals. Go check out the largest 'Steampunk' pages on facebook. They're usually a half-dozen creators spamming the pages with their wares to an audience of no-one. The groups themselves are low quality, so despite having thousands of members there's no meaningful activity and everyone has long since stopped checking them.

This isn't to be all doom-and-gloom, but I do think that we may have to start considering that we are a dying star in an empty sky. There's nothing wrong with that. It just means it's important that we all enjoy the time we still have left together.
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Post  Ottens Sun Jan 16, 2022 1:55 pm

I think you're absolutely right.

Social media has not helped steampunk. The spam you mention is a problem. One cause of that is poor moderation. People start Facebook groups without a plan, without experience managing online communities and without the time and/or will to see it through.

Unfortunately, most people are lazy and still choose the convenience of Facebook over the obvious alternative: message-board communities. Message boards take more planning and commitment, they usually self-organize, and they actually foster the sense of community that Facebook and other social media promise - but lack.

Unfortunately, the majority of users don't appreciate that and are content to take whatever Mark Zuckerberg gives them.

Then there's the whole political aspect, which is a far worse problem on Twitter. In past years there was a small but loud group of activists who seemed more interested in tearing steampunk(s) down than building it up. I think this has scared people away. Most of those activists have now moved on to other things, having succeeded in giving steampunk the sigma of being racist.

Add to that the natural ebb and flow of any style and subculture, and I think it's undeniable steampunk has peaked.

(Although I remember I got pilloried for warning about this three years ago...)
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Post  James Harrison Sun Jan 16, 2022 5:31 pm

At risk of taking the conversation way off-topic, I don't disagree, steampunk has peaked- if by steampunk you're referring to as we knew it back in the late 2000s/ early 2010s, when we had just BG and a few other fora and the scene was less about fancy dress and more about an artistic response to the works of the early science fiction writers.

And then social media took off and the culture became more of a media circus for a few years, and the fora started to die down in favour of Facebook groups. Which I hate by the way, they're more akin to a room full of people competing for attention than civilised conversation and collaboration. Interesting topics get forced down the page by the latest 'look Look LOOK at me' post by somebody who has likely spammed three other groups in the same fashion already that morning before breakfast.

But- people seem to like social media and it is still attracting new people into Steampunk. New people with their own ideas of what it is and what it should be. And then thrown in that social media has the ability to allow people to set up their own geographically local groups- and the new folk are more likely to find and interact with those than a general steampunk group- and you have the situation I think we're entering, where we have thriving local little societies based wholly on the Zuckerbeasts platform, all of which say they're steampunk. But the core community and the ethos behind those groups- the worldwide one that BG fostered- has stalled. I suppose an apt analogy would be planets orbiting a dead star.

So what does this mean for the future? Well the creation of fb or similar 'local groups for local steampunks' means that the social scene is going to keep going strong, even if diluted to the rate of fancy dress outings to the local arboretum for a picnic. Maybe that's what most people in the community want, as there seems little appetite to have the sort of group on fb that we had/ have in BG- a quasi-philosophical/ artistic working group that sets out to debate what we are, what it means to be a steampunk and even what it is. Socially, it's more or less morphed into a sort or backward-looking rose tinted navel gazing at the 'glory days' of Empire, with a dash of whimsy thrown in to make it difficult to be viewed as straight-up nostalgia for what should be seen as an abhorrent era of Western history. Think pith helmets and cosplay talk of 'when I was out in Africa, whatwhat' rather than the more stimulating and interesting discussions of what might have been had Tesla been less difficult to get on with.

Not to paint too depressing a picture though, there's always going to be that small group of us who are in it more for the artistic and intellectual aspect. There are always going to be the makers who haul something out of a charity shop and take it away into their shed, to be presented six months hence worked into something wonderful. There are always going to be the writers looking to pull us into worlds that perhaps should have been. There are always going to be the critical thinkers pondering just what it is we are and what we're trying to articulate, and how. It's just becoming more difficult to separate out the noise from the signal.

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Post  J. Wilhelm Sun Jan 16, 2022 5:52 pm

Ottens wrote:I think you're absolutely right.

Social media has not helped steampunk. The spam you mention is a problem. One cause of that is poor moderation. People start Facebook groups without a plan, without experience managing online communities and without the time and/or will to see it through.

Unfortunately, most people are lazy and still choose the convenience of Facebook over the obvious alternative: message-board communities. Message boards take more planning and commitment, they usually self-organize, and they actually foster the sense of community that Facebook and other social media promise - but lack.

Unfortunately, the majority of users don't appreciate that and are content to take whatever Mark Zuckerberg gives them.

Then there's the whole political aspect, which is a far worse problem on Twitter. In past years there was a small but loud group of activists who seemed more interested in tearing steampunk(s) down than building it up. I think this has scared people away. Most of those activists have now moved on to other things, having succeeded in giving steampunk the sigma of being racist.

Add to that the natural ebb and flow of any style and subculture, and I think it's undeniable steampunk has peaked.

(Although I remember I got pilloried for warning about this three years ago...)

On that activist movement you speak of, that was more than just a couple of years ago. If memory serves me well, I successfully defended an attack - well before 2019, I think before I was a moderator. The jist of the argument was exactly as you say. The poster had an online platform literally dedicated to making the argument that Steampunk was racist. When that person came to BG she happened to walk right into a heavy discussion in a "private club" or sub-group thread dedicated to Native American Steampunks.

Apparently she had an issue with the characterization of Native Mexicans as being a group in a state of flux, fusing with western culture (an undeniable fact stemming from the Spanish Conquest with ramifications spreading over 500 years). I basically pummeled her with facts, because she basically knew nothing about Latin American native people, nor the present ethnography (diversity) of that part of the world (not a surprise in the US, I'm sad to say. It's baked into the educational system). My assessment is that there are a lot of people who have very strong opinions about personal ideas, and very few facts to push their agenda. They like the attention that conspiracy theories bring.

It's easier to spread and perpetuate misinformation if you target ignorant people and the medium you choose to communicate discourages discourse, or even the exposition of ideas beyond 140 characters.

It's not impossible to use that type of media, however; I've done it on Twitter among circles of professors, eg on the Porfiriato Era (Industrial age and Europeanization of Mexico) and the subsequent Mexican Civil War (La Revolución), but it takes a strong effort to reduce long verbiage to captions under pretty pictures. Quoted sources are critical to cement one's position and direct the public to deeper learning. No doubt, the pretty pictures literally pull the audience in. And coincidentally, I practiced on the use of graphics and sources right here in Brassgoggles for many years. Having to advertise for my business on Twitter many moons ago also gave me the "chops" to do precisely that.

Still, I enjoy the process, because when done right, you end up educating the public with essentially very polished "flash cards," discussing fairly complex subjects in less than say 10 or 15 posts, and they come back to thank you for teaching them something they had no clue about (and I'm talking about PhDs in history, political science, architecture and many other intellectual areas from the US UK, Europe and many other places, as well as the general public). The problem is that it's difficult to do, requires a lot of dedication and deep knowledge on your subject of interest, and not everyone wants to do that. Most people aren't "teaching" 24/7 like me. They just want to relax and interact with like-minded people.

I still want to try using that approach for a "Steampunk blog" which perhaps could exist in a cross platform fashion. Let's see if that gets stimied by trolls, but my experience is that if the knowledge difference between troll and OP is large enough, the trolls get bored and leave,or they don't even engage in the presence of an avalanche of facts with sources and pictures.
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Post  J. Wilhelm Sun Jan 16, 2022 6:54 pm

The Corsair wrote:I hate to be the one to voice it, but is there some validity to the notion that our problems stem from Steampunk itself?

Snip

I second almost everything you've detailed in in this post, just noting that we've noticed that for some time now. I'm not convinced, however that Steampunk will just die. Nothing ever dies. You just need to connect to another generation, even if it's by way of monuments you left behind, so to speak. The most important topic you wrote about in your post is on pulling Steampunks back from their Diaspora.

I think -and this is just an opinion- the only way to do that is to spread our tentacles to other platforms. And by that, I don't mean hold any discussions there, but rather using our posts as bait to pull them back into the forum format. I mention one approach on Twitter in my previous post above, but we can replicate-with various degrees of success- on Pinterest and other graphics heavy media... Yes including Facebook, where I presume most Steampunks reside.

Oh, I do wish that we take advantage of this opportunity to upgrade the software platform we've been using. There has to be a more modern alternative that is not so easy to snuff out.

Also, and most importantly, don't underestimate the power of the newcomer. I was surprised to find in my Steampunk business that my primary clientele were all middle aged people who had just discovered Steampunk. Very few were dedicated Steampunks who attended social gatherings and conventions, because they were new to all of that. I'm under the impression that the best way to bring Steampunk back is to attract new blood, so to speak. Literally, we are in charge of spreading the message.
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Post  Ottens Sun Jan 16, 2022 9:36 pm

I think there's a tradeoff with social media. Yes, it's easier to find and get involved in something new. But it comes at the expense of depth and substance. Quantity over quality, if you will. The same stuff gets reposted over and over again. The same debates repeat themselves, but with different people. It makes it feel like steampunk is stuck.
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Post  James Harrison Sun Jan 16, 2022 10:11 pm

Ottens wrote:I think there's a tradeoff with social media. Yes, it's easier to find and get involved in something new. But it comes at the expense of depth and substance. Quantity over quality, if you will. The same stuff gets reposted over and over again. The same debates repeat themselves, but with different people. It makes it feel like steampunk is stuck.

Pretty much exactly my thoughts also (see my long post a couple hours ago).  My experience with people joining us via social media, rather than having to make an effort to find us out as used to be the case, is that they tend to be more in the way of bystanders and onlookers rather than get into the heavy lifting work of contributing to the body of 'stuff' to talk about within the community.  Their conversations are more 'look what I've found' (link to something we've been aware of the last five years if not more) than 'look what I'm doing' (followed by something new to talk about).
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Post  The Corsair Mon Jan 17, 2022 2:17 am

J. Wilhelm wrote:
I think -and this is just an opinion- the only way to do that is to spread our tentacles to other platforms. And by that, I don't mean hold any discussions there, but rather using our posts as bait to pull them back into the forum format. I mention one approach on Twitter in my previous post above, but we can replicate-with various degrees of success- on Pinterest and other graphics heavy media... Yes including Facebook, where I presume most Steampunks reside.

Hard agree on this. To that end, a unified 'forum brand' that we control via quorum (as has been well-discussed here so far) is to my mind the core of that. As much as the engagement needs to be a grassroots 'person-to-person' kind of thing, having a bit of polish on the name will help lure people in.

For example, if people keep seeing images on pinterest with a small brass goggles logo on it then eventually they'll start to wonder what that is. We can use #BrassGoggles as a tag on our posts when we discuss steampunk in other places. Engage personally, but saturate the space with the forum brand.

It doesn't have to be a formal brand as in 'This is a thing someone owns', but if we homogenise the way we talk about the forum when we're on other platforms then we can give it the appearance of being the 'centre' of Steampunk.
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Post  J. Wilhelm Mon Jan 17, 2022 3:26 am

The Corsair wrote:
J. Wilhelm wrote:
I think -and this is just an opinion- the only way to do that is to spread our tentacles to other platforms. And by that, I don't mean hold any discussions there, but rather using our posts as bait to pull them back into the forum format. I mention one approach on Twitter in my previous post above, but we can replicate-with various degrees of success- on Pinterest and other graphics heavy media... Yes including Facebook, where I presume most Steampunks reside.

Hard agree on this. To that end, a unified 'forum brand' that we control via quorum (as has been well-discussed here so far) is to my mind the core of that. As much as the engagement needs to be a grassroots 'person-to-person' kind of thing, having a bit of polish on the name will help lure people in.

For example, if people keep seeing images on pinterest with a small brass goggles logo on it then eventually they'll start to wonder what that is. We can use #BrassGoggles as a tag on our posts when we discuss steampunk in other places. Engage personally, but saturate the space with the forum brand.

It doesn't have to be a formal brand as in 'This is a thing someone owns', but if we homogenise the way we talk about the forum when we're on other platforms then we can give it the appearance of being the 'centre' of Steampunk.

The brand and tag are mandatory, actually. One thing to remember is that in pinterest, the pictures can be linked to the forum. These are direct links you set when you post the photo. All the viewers need to do is click on the link. There is no "membership wall" in the outbound direction. The opposite is not true, however. Pinterest, like Instagram do interrupt newcomers insisting they should sign up for the service, but that wouldn't affect us. Go take a look at https://www.pinterest.com/luftschiffengel/ aka "Julin-Wodinaz Bahlmann," my Pinterest acct. (it only has a small Steampunk segment, because I don't use that account for my (defunct) Steampunk business, and I have many other personal interests I display there. You might have to sign up if you want to see the pictures on frame format, that is, as an organized gallery.

The pictures you post on your gallery can be picked up by the Pinterest app from websites you visit (in which case a link to the website is automatically added), other pinterest accounts or you can post directly on your account from your hard drive. Either way you should provide a link and hashtags as matter of principle. You can also split the Pinterest account into different boards, to start dividing between Anatomical topics and Metaphysical topics, for example. Just remember that outsiders don't necessarily know what "Anatomical" means to us.

Below are some pictures of my profile page and boards (I think Mozilla Firefox is cropping the images- you might have to zoom in, or open the image in a new page) You can see how gallery boards are organized. You need to be logged in to see someone's profile page or even your own boards in this organized fashion:

We seem to be down again - Page 5 FJQ8EQdXwAU9fiJ?format=jpg&name=large

And this is what each board looks like:

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When you click on a picture you'll see this (this was some other Pinterest user's picture I inserted into my board). Click on the enlarged picture and you're taken directly to the source website. In this case, an account on Instagram. If the website was Brassgoggles, it would read Brassgoggles.co.uk

We seem to be down again - Page 5 FJQ-jIoWYAEdAXS?format=jpg&name=large

There are comments attached to each picture which allow users to discuss the pictures, but they're not very useful for an actual in depth discussion, because people tend to click on the pictures first and they're taken out of that page. But you can have a fair number of commenters similar to most other platforms.

J. Wilhelm
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Post  Ottens Mon Jan 17, 2022 4:42 pm

J. Wilhelm wrote:Pinterest, like Instagram do interrupt newcomers insisting they should sign up for the service.

Another reason I hate both. The arrogance of these platforms is staggering. It makes sense you need to create an account in order to interact with the content, but merely to see it? Preposterous.
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Post  J. Wilhelm Mon Jan 17, 2022 6:54 pm

Ottens wrote:
J. Wilhelm wrote:Pinterest, like Instagram do interrupt newcomers insisting they should sign up for the service.

Another reason I hate both. The arrogance of these platforms is staggering. It makes sense you need to create an account in order to interact with the content, but merely to see it? Preposterous.

That's the biggest caveat. It's a self defeating mechanism. I just noticed they've changed their policy and are at least publishing samples from people's accounts. This tells you they're aware of the self harm they impinge on themselves. Yet, I've found that Pinterest is, at least, extremely useful as a library of links for those who are not afraid to join in. Visually vis a vis graphic content it's unparalleled due to their frame architecture and organizing algorithms.
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Post  SeVeNeVeS Tue Jan 18, 2022 8:02 pm

1700 PM UK time 18.01.2022

It's Up And Working Again!!. Looks like we are back in business cheers
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Post  von Corax Tue Jan 18, 2022 8:19 pm

Confirmed.

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Post  Xenos Wed Jan 19, 2022 4:14 am

I too can confirm it's up and running again. Glad to see it!
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Post  RockyB Tue Aug 02, 2022 1:56 pm

Are we down again?
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