Hey!

Although most members will simply examine the length of this topic and click away or quickly judge; I'll post it anyway for the CEDA staff if they actually care for constructive criticism and suggested improvements. Below are a list of my suggestions and a brief explanation. I'd love to read some feedback.

Role-Play Section - The Role-Play forum has been under construction for a long time now. When I registered, I originally wanted to role-play as a new academy student. I tried to stir up some role-play since the forum has been under construction since forever.

The Examination - I believe the examination should be more detailed on restrictions. I remember watching an argument over the chat between two members about if a deck is an OTK or not. There should be a brief explanation of how -this academy- declares something as an OTK (obviously including OTK's general definition). As an extension to this, testers should be contacting registered duelist as soon as they see their registration post to request available times and other important information. This will bring active members to the forum.

The CEDA Staff - I understand it's difficult and overwhelming to be a staff member, however there should be certain people you need to contact for certain things. The staff shouldn't be built on only several people doing the exact same thing. The staff should be grouped into tasks. For example, one set of staff members should only concern themselves with forum moderation for the dorm rooms; the other with the Battle Arena and the Shadow Arena, etc. Therefore, if you have a problem with A, you can contact moderator A. This will ease the staff's workload.

Second of all, there should be guidelines to the CEDA staff. If there is already, I have no noticed it because all I see is a several staff members running around in circles and doing what -they- feel is right because -they- have powers other people don't. There should be guides on professionalism, behavior, and how to properly handle situations. As I mentioned previously in "The Examination", I noticed administrators debating on OTK decks, then suddenly, blindly arguing and getting personal with each other because of disagreements. These topics shouldn't be on chat, but instead, patiently discussed in a private forum. We all have differences, but getting pissed off at each other over it is just plain immature and wrong.

Forum Flexibility - This forum is not user welcomed. It seems like any other academy out there. There needs to be things going on that will attract new members. This does -not- mean adding useless smileys for topics. It's even worse that this forum is branched off of Forummotion which shows that the founder clearly doesn't want to dedicate a few bucks to purchase an actual URL to dedicate to this community. If he / she cannot afford this, they don't need to start a community. It's just like a starting a business, you need assets to build.

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I had several other suggestions, but I completely forget while I was explaining the others. I'll surely post them sooner or later.

i disagree with the cost of forums being needed to create a strong community .... i have been around the yugioh forums for quite some time (first joined a forum for yugioh online in 2006) .... one of the best forums i was proud to be a member of for several years until it closed in 2009 was Warrior's United .... it was based on an invisionfree board .... it was a dang good forum ... the down fall to that forum was real life ... the owners and staff all got bored with yugioh online and thus went on to other activities or had children which took up 99% of their time and when they could play or get online they were worn out and really didnt have the time to put full effort into coding and fixing stuff that had broken when they were away..... i have also seen forums where they paid out the ass in cash for a system and i watched it fail rather quickly .... its not about the quantity of members ... its quality .... i know i for one will not put out money on a forum system again unless i know that there is a way for it to self sustain .... everyone knows that it is a hard economy right now without the added pressure to come up with cash to pay for a forum to talk about a hobby

Cool. Thanks for some feedback. I agree with you in that sense. When owning your own domain and host space, there are much more options. That's another reason why I support the private domain

dont get me wrong ... owning your own system is nice but cost wise it really isnt worth the work .... server space, bandwidth, among other costs plus the licensing for the individual software is a headache that really isnt worth it .... there are a lot of background costs that the normal user doesn't see

This is a fun online community, not a business. In case you haven't noticed, our previous forum with over 1000 members got hacked and every single post got deleted, so right now, we're focused on gaining members back and rebuilding the forum to where it was.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.

Aang wrote:

This is a fun online community, not a business. In case you haven't noticed, our previous forum with over 1000 members got hacked and every single post got deleted, so right now, we're focused on gaining members back and rebuilding the forum to where it was.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.

Of course I noticed, otherwise I wouldn't be on the forum at the moment. This thread isn't supposed to be accepted and acted upon ASAP. It's something good to consider. Thanks.

Malicious Hero. wrote:

Aang wrote:

This is a fun online community, not a business. In case you haven't noticed, our previous forum with over 1000 members got hacked and every single post got deleted, so right now, we're focused on gaining members back and rebuilding the forum to where it was.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.

Of course I noticed, otherwise I wouldn't be on the forum at the moment. This thread isn't supposed to be accepted and acted upon ASAP. It's something good to consider. Thanks.

Yeah, but right now we're just focused on getting back up on our feet again, then we will look towards the more major improvements.

Regarding the whole "staff" thing, our staff have their own jobs. A moderator's main job is to moderate the forum, manage topics and posts, moderate the chatbox, and Award BA's/SA's. A teachers main job is to test people into the dorms (don't know why it's not just Tester instead of Teachers, since they don't really do any "Teaching" anyway, but oh well.) The War Manager (as the name suggests) manages all things regarding Wars, like Team Registrations, active wars, the Warzone section of the forum etc etc. GFX people are to make GFX work for the site. Admins are to handle the bigger things for the forum, like the things in the Admin Panel, and the overall structure and look etc of the forum, whilst also moderating the chat. Staff are not all over the place with their work.

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll briefly address all of them.

Role-Play Section:
As I posted in another suggestion about this, there simply isn't anyone that has the time/motivation to properly manage this section. This was supposed to be done by Nyan on our old Forum, but we all know what happened there. When we find someone who is up for the task, we can open it up for real.

The Examination:
We already tried to be as clear as possible. We even added specific banlists to make it more understandable. This, however, was viewed by the majority of the community to be a "They just can't beat these threats" and such. If we'd give a specific list of OTK Decks that are banned, this effect will be quadruppled, if not more. This is also where another part of the Teacher's job comes into play: they have the final word about wether a Deck is OTK or not.

The CEDA Staff:
Due to the making of this new site, we have some issues regarding Staff jobs and positions, but they will all be ironed out in due time. So just bear with us a little bit longer

Forum Flexibility:
Not quite sure what you mean with that this Forum is not user-welcomed... We have all the main things that a User would need to find their way around here. We even added a Menu on the right for our most important posts and subjects. As for an official domain name, these things have been discussed already, but as Aang stated previously, they're not our priority at the moment.


Thanks for posting your suggestions though

P.S. @ Aang: A teacher also posts stuff in the Library, like Decato's CotW. That's why they're Teachers and not Testers.