Does the forum seems a bit quiet these days to anyone else?

[noman]

I suppose those of us that grew up playing jungle girl are getting a bit old for hentai games, but even the influx of newcomers seem to have died down. Where is the main centre of discussion these days? Reddit?

 

[Deleted member 80122]

Real life and work etc catches up too people so eventually they will be buried deep down enough that they will be too tired to interact with others To give thou a more simple answer people from around here hang around the ULMF Discord Server these days so if you wanna hang out with people go there.

 

[super_slicer]

Well, honestly alot of people just stopped coming. Don't know where they went and there are probably a number of reasons why. One of them may be that F95zone is a thing. Maybe they went there? I dunno, we seem to focus on different game types, most of the games on there are shitty VNs with bad 3d models afwul Engrish annnnnd well I don't like the way they moderate or that they seem to be liberal SJW cucks. But you might like it, of course there are those of us that remain here and will engage in conversation if it interests us.

 

[XSI]

This happens every december, all around the internet. People finishing off work and doing holiday prep so they're too busy to do much online
Unless you mean longer term than a month, in which case I'll just say I don't think quantity matters. I'd rather see one good discussion than 20 bad ones

 

[noman]

... One of them may be that F95zone is a thing... well I don't like the way they moderate or that they seem to be liberal SJW cucks. But you might like it...

Well, not when you put it that way XD. I should check out the ulmf discord though. I haven't really used discord in the past.

 

[teapotdome]

Well, honestly alot of people just stopped coming. Don't know where they went and there are probably a number of reasons why. One of them may be that F95zone is a thing. Maybe they went there? I dunno, we seem to focus on different game types, most of the games on there are shitty VNs with bad 3d models afwul Engrish annnnnd well I don't like the way they moderate or that they seem to be liberal SJW cucks. But you might like it, of course there are those of us that remain here and will engage in conversation if it interests us.

f95zone is fucking weird to me. It's mind boggling that so many people are interested in shitty 3D Renpy incest VNs. It also feels like over half the posts use questionable at best English.

 

[Darkboy]

Where is the main centre of discussion these days? Reddit?

Not unless you like shadowbans. Far as I can tell, 'Discussion' is something that isn't good for the legal well-being of those that host the sites. Even the chans are on their way out, have been for a couple years. I'll admit I left this place a long time ago, and even now am just popping back in to have a look-see. Haven't even lurked, but considering everywhere else I've ever frequented is either gone or big-brothered to hell and back I may just have to consider hanging around.
I mean this is a porn site at heart and from inception, so if there's anything to keep the NPC masses away, and subsequently- those that wish to herd and shepard said masses via insane mod overreach, its that.
Also gotta admit I like the design! Dark-mode looks good and the posting UI is both easy to use and easy on the eyes.

 

[Jesus]

I've had the feeling ULMF has been quieter since the dreaded forum software upgrade. The unanticipated downtime, then the sudden absence of features we were used to, the level of disorganisation it ended up in, I don't imagine the proportion of active users we lost because of all that was small.

Then on top of that, a lot of users disagreed with the standard of posting we began to demand, at least within the H-games section. Right or wrong, disagreement and disgruntlement about the rules and enforcement of them certainly resulted in some people packing their proverbial bags, or choosing just to lurk.

I think another major thing is the rise in popularity of western adult games - It surprises me too that so many people enjoy these asset-flip VNs, but to each their own. I don't doubt a non-insignificant portion of users were only really seeking that relatively vanilla stuff - not so much niche fetishes and content - and there are much better places to discuss and discover it than here, especially now.

Finally, I don't think so many good H-games are getting released at the frequency they used to be. Maybe that's just my perception, but it's once in a blue moon that I'll find a new game worth making a thread about if one doesn't already exist.

 

[MrMe]

I think a large part of the reason is that the forum has shifted from a hentai sharing site to a hentai discussion site, which I think is the same thing that caused most of hongfire's users to migrate away
F95 might be cluttered up with 0.00001 patreon dumps of horrible dubious quality, but it does enforce a good OP template with multiple links.

Personally I'm trying to focus on hobbies that aren't jerking off
It also seems I've reached the bottom of the spiral (remember LM's blog posts about that?), because whenever I get the urge I just play/watch one of the old items in my collection, it's rare I find something new and interesting these days. Hell, I've been so far down the spiral for so long that vanilla and fantasizing from bikini shots are interesting again.

 

[ShadyRyl]

alot of people come here to just grab things, and leave. while some mostly discourage to talk due to the Obvious reason.
Some just comes to Fap, not to chat.

 

[Pervy]

What Jesus said, short of the not so many new games I feel like I see the opposite but that's hard to quantify, plus:

The double dose of forum downs/Forum switches killed a lot of activity. Less current traffic, less new traffic.

 

[super_slicer]

While we're on the topic, anyone have any solutions that don't involve peeling back the rule changes? Not that I necessarily see this as a problem per-say.

 

[Pervy]

While we're on the topic, anyone have any solutions that don't involve peeling back the rule changes? Not that I necessarily see this as a problem per-say.

Well actually reverting the rules I'd be opposed against. They were perhaps not introduced in an ideal manner, ain't judging that here, but now that they are there as long as you are smooth about presenting them, maintaining the rules is better than reverting them and re-offending another crowd of people.

Beyond that, some positive community engagement, perhaps some efforts to help people browse more easily... A lot of the community activity has switched to Discord which is not exclusively a good thing, at least insofar as it makes the forum look less active by default.

Ultimately there's an ebb and flow to these things, which is why I keep doing forum rps, even if there's little interest going on, sometimes you just gotta keep doing.

 

[noman]

I think a large part of the reason is that the forum has shifted from a hentai sharing site to a hentai discussion site, which I think is the same thing that caused most of hongfire's users to migrate away
F95 might be cluttered up with 0.00001 patreon dumps of horrible dubious quality, but it does enforce a good OP template with multiple links.

Personally I'm trying to focus on hobbies that aren't jerking off
It also seems I've reached the bottom of the spiral (remember LM's blog posts about that?), because whenever I get the urge I just play/watch one of the old items in my collection, it's rare I find something new and interesting these days. Hell, I've been so far down the spiral for so long that vanilla and fantasizing from bikini shots are interesting again.

I remember the spiral, but not what LM said was at the bottom, if there's one. The exhaustion / not finding anything new or interesting is real though. Obviously there are unique and noteworthy new games, but 99% of the new games are variations of existing games. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but good sequels are rare.

Regarding the rules, I think they are alright. Creating a new account on ULMF is easy, and you don't have to write a 800 words essay like SSTM. I don't understand why anyone would be desperate enough to actually jump through all the hoops in order to be able to become a full member of SSTM. It just seems insane to spend hours to gain admission into a forum.

 

[XSI]

For activity suggestions, I personally remember two things as being very active. Threads about good games and roleplays. There have always been a lot of threads about games that just weren't that interesting for whatever reason and didn't see much activity. So nothing changed in that regard. There is still activity and discussion on the good game threads
Sure, there can be improvements, but it's not really a problem

What I think is a large part of the reason why there's less activity is the roleplay section
A quick check on there shows only two signup threads from this year, and one post in the 'looking for players' thread this year(Today, even)
Out of the other non-archive roleplay sections, there seem to be only three out of fifteen sections with a latest post in 2019. Some of them even seem to have a last post in 2012 or before that!
I understand that a lot of roleplay moved to Discord, but I do think that an active roleplay community will grow the activity of other sections as well. People are invited to a game of some sort, post a character sheet, read up on the rules, and so on. And since they already signed up to post their sheet they take a look at other things they're interested in
My suggestion would be to try to figure out what that section is doing, where it's going, and maybe take a broom and move some of the old stuff into archives so that people can see what is recent and they can still join, or find a way to get the section active again.

Or perhaps people have grown tired of roleplay, don't have the time for it anymore, and so on. Times change, people's interests change, but either way I think the loss of active forum games/roleplays/play by post stuff may have something to do with it. It used to feel like there was a new forum game starting every other day, but now it seems like everyone just moved on

 

[Pervy]

I genuinly stopped doing much of a sign up because well.. no one really responded to those things. The formatting is a bit awful but that's not it entirely. Clearing up all the old and unused threads would certainly be a first start. Allows those -looking- for roleplays to actually find active stuff.
The forum-switchover killed things something fierce as best as I could observe.

I can attest that people have not grown tired of roleplay, things are quite active on my little subforum, heck, started two new things within the last two days, just as you noted.. ^^

So yeah, give playerz!

 

[super_slicer]

Unfortunately I have no jurisdiction in that sub and I highly doubt those that do will notice this thread or act on it... Hell, we can't even get a dedicated mod for THIS sub and I stirred up a literal shitstorm, what was it, a year ago? in an attempt to get SOMETHING done about it. The way I see it, for this discussion we should probably assume that subs in which Darkfire or myself don't have authority won't be seeing any changes. I do agree with your reasoning, though, getting the other subs up to snuff would certainly be a good thing.

I was thinking that we could get the community involved with the re-tagging process ( once I finish that list ) as a way of providing some engagement but the last time we tried that ( updating thread names and OPs) it was less than 30 users that actually engaged in this activity. I know it's kind of a shitty community activity that's tantamount to work but... that's the best I've got.

 

[XSI]

That's basically my experience with any initiative to clean up things or organize something people consider public space
Majority of people don't want to help out. Not that they don't care, they like it when it's done. Just that they don't care enough to help with it

 

[Torgent]

In my opinion the posting standards play a big role, today I wanted to look into discussion about enuemus new game, since it came out a few days ago, and mine is either bugged because I used the demosave or you really revert to the loading screen once you get offed by an enemy, instead of GOR or even a Game Over screen. Low and behold, super slicer (not flaming, you are just doing your job) already closed the topic with an ok opening post for not checking of all marks of the standards for Threads about released games once the game was out for just one day.

No wonder no discussion arises and users are leaving the forum, I get my answer on 4XXXX after 5 minutes and never bother with the thread in this forum again. Same happened when scalegardens or ahrimans last game came out. And yeah, most people can't be bothered to spend half an hour to post an opening post that checks all the marks and instead go to another forum. In my opinion the Standards should be more lax like 3/4 of the marks checked and be open at least a week until initial discussion about a new game waters down. This way both sides would probably be satisfied. The way it currently goes this will be my last post at this forum because a forum with 90% locked threads about new game is not worth visiting.

I am a member of the ulmf forums since a long time, and I understand that most of the threads from the pre-update area had horrible 10 word openings, which is why I don't say completely disregard the better standards for opening rules, but saying the forum is losing members simply because there is another forum (f95) is like saying amazon killed my store when I refused to make a website because Internet will be fad.

Also yeah, the upgrade itself, the downtime and the long lack of search function were a major streak of bad luck. But the forum was the greatest h-forum still until the rule change.
I don't think the fact that no links to the games being allowed in this forum is a big bother since everyone who is smart enough to make a good post can find links to the games on another page without discussion and no filesharing means longevity for this forum. Enough rant.

 

[DarkFire1004]

I think a lot of people have touched upon the major reasons here. In the non-H Sections, the forum software dying killed off interest in a lot of the older members that were there to talk to each other. In the H-Sections, the new rule changes have killed a lot of interest because of the higher posting standards.

Whether the rule changes are good or bad are a different debate that I don't really want to get into. However, I believe that people don't really "leave" the forum if they were only interested in the H-Section. The typical person who uses ULMF for h-content is mostly there to take and not give. The new rules have made it so that they have even less incentive to try to post. But they still benefit from the people who do take the time to produce content or information, so they don't actually leave; they just lurk.

As for the people who were going to post more, but thought against it in face of the new rules, I'm also willing to bet that a good 70% of them didn't actually read the rules and misunderstood the actual boundaries. I'm guessing they probably think at least one of the following:

- No links allowed at all
- No asking about translation downloads
- OPs need to be an epic novel length
- There are a million new additions/changes to the original rules and I can't be bothered to read all of them

Ignoring the last one, none of those were ever true. And yet because of some of the bans or warnings, people made the assumption that these must be the new rules because of what they saw, but never verified. Meanwhile, the gigantic stickied Rules thread is so imposing to look at, they don't even want to verify. But what they don't really realize is that there were really only two major changes to the rules: No asking for game links, and OPs have to follow a certain standard. The rest are addendums and clarifications to the rules because people keep on circumventing, misunderstanding, or otherwise needing things spelled out in no unclear terms.

The remaining 30% is the unfortunate part. They probably read the rules, and still made the decision that it isn't worth coming to the forum anyway. And to be honest, I don't really blame them. The rules were made to keep the low effort posting to a minimum, but because of how strictly we've enforced it, it's made the lives of those who've done nothing wrong harder. I'm not opposed to relaxing the standard, given that it's been more than a year since we first made the change and it looks like people have more or less adapted to it by now, but I also don't really like how many times I've had to change the rules already and think it shows indecision in the mod team.