Bit-tech has lost its spirit

On the subject of reviews I think the system of letting members write a review and send it in for consideration is great. I do love the Graphics card reviews, they are some of the best and I'd hate to see these go. Other reviews (Cases etc) I tend to go elsewhere for simply because other places offer the information I want. Bit could try and put the reviewing responsibility on members (with the exception of the excellent gfx reviews) and shift the focus back to the modding (any staff have projects in the pipeline anymore?).

 

That's the thing, as this site has shifted from just being a hobby to being a money making venture and I'm sure that most of the guys just don't have the time to start making mods.

After doing 80+hour weeks I'm sure the last thing they want to see when they go home is a computer, and I'm sure that they would like to spend some time with their family/friends.

 

Those who work in the office, dont mod. Those who mod from home, mod. They have jobs, lives, familys to work around which is why not only does making a front page mod take normally a hell of a long time, such is, it takes even longer.

If you got an awesome mod every week or every month you'd no longer be bothered with them. They'd become passe. But at least now when one does come out you can savour it like a rare 20oz steak to the the rampant beasts you are.

Weld: Be a little more diplomatic in what you have to say. Blatent flaming will not be tollerated.

 

I'm new in the Forum, 'cause of that i never knew the old spirit, but i must say this :
I've been in many forums through the years and i never been in a Forum like this.
IMHO this is almost "The Forum", because in here we can talk and debate so many subjects - from computers to mods, from projects to electronics, from software to hardware, from audio to image, from music to films, from politics to religion, etc... and with a very important thing nowadays _ no censorship.

For all of this i think The Forum has a Great and Modern Spirit.

I want to tanx all the Moderators for the great job, and to let me belong to this great community.

 

just thought of one thing that the forum used to have that created a community feel-

something that always used to be fun on the forum were the small weekly competitions!

case badge competitions!!! bring them back!

The big competitions are all right, but there far to competative when people are playing for stuff worth some serious cash.


Im sure if the oldies around here have a bit of a think we can come up with some more stuff that used to happen on the forums that instilled a community feel and that can be reinstated without to much effort.

 

There was a comp for case badges last week, the "guess this" thread.

 

its back and i didnt even notice. stuff like that should not be in GD

Bring back the Competitions forum!

 

Crap, i gotta do another for this week.

 

if you look back a little, the biggest change to the site occured when it went "corporate", or in other words, people were actually starting to make money off the site. now that some staff members are getting paid is there a need to do nothing but reviews? i understand that reviews are necessary, and they are still brilliant, however, why cannot there be a little bit of modding?

the staff are getting paid to work on bit-tech, bit-tech is a modding website, so there should be no problem with staff getting paid to mod. think back to the last few mods that got on the front page, most of them got /.'ed, that is a massive amount of traffic, so if we have staff mods comming out every so often, and from experience these mods will get /.'ed, then you going to see a large increase of traffic (which, im guessing, is the whole idea).

is there a notion that now your geting paid, you have to review products, and write reports. why cannot you get paid to do modding? it increases traffic, increase exposure, and creates something unique.

there is nothing unique about reviews. they do not create traffic. but mods.... they create traffic, lots of it. think of all the review sites that link to us when a top-notch mod gets finished, these sites are nover going to link to us for a hardware review.... that's what they are doing.....

we need to become unique again, that is what gets traffic, that is how to become a focal point of a community, do something that no-one has seen before. do some unique mods, get the staff building something, and sit back and wait for the /. flood, and hope your server hold up....

 

I've gotta say I've felt it too, and is definately related in part to my absence over the last week or so. Granted I've been quite busy as well. Still, when I first came here I was almost doing nothing but reading project logs. Now I very rarely go in there... I guess just because the new format isn't working for me. It has it's merits, but I immediately felt less interested in modding since the switch - posting a major update on a project and getting absolutely no feedback is just downright dissapointing, and completely takes away from posting it in the first place. Given the two, I now definately prefer the old system, even though I was one of the very first to switch my log to the new format (until it actually came into effect, I loved the idea). The new system disconnects the timing between discussion and updates, which makes the discussion confusing and in any case having twenty posts of ten (or many more) images takes a long time to load even on broadband. I think a "show posts by original author" option combined with the original system would be much better. But I'm not just talking about logs.

I would definately like to see more mod coverage on the front page. While reviews are great, they're just not an overly appealing read unless it's something you're looking for, and in any case, graphics card and processor performance is relatievly predictable (and while I definately like the GPU testing system, I think the recent 'use these settings at X res' is great as well, though 1280x1024 doesn't do me much good with my 1920x1200 panel, and even when I had a CRT I liked to keep my resolution constant). I love(d) looking through project logs and reading about new tech is great, but there are a hundred other review sites out there. Heck, I used to run one. We do need something different again. Guides, mods, competitions, editorials, whatever. I'd almost say go for an even broader audience - things that apply to everyone. Wasn't there a multi-part photography guide that was never finished? System tweaks for free performance boosts, maybe?

Modding has become a bit mainstream to show off the latest and greatest, but there's a lot of stuff unplumbed. Maybe a guide on how to sell your old crap on eBay to finance your new system/mod? I don't know what really, but reading really just isn't as interesting as it used to be.

 

Excellent, and right on the mark Firehed..
I am not a fan of the "new" project log format..Feedback is all-important in building these machines and with the "change" it's just not there..
Within a few moths I will start another project, I am not sure if I will even-bother with a project log...It's just not the same.. I may just post in the "modding" forum..
PS: glad to see your return Firehed.
How do we get the BIT to "switch-back" to the good-old-style of project logs?
All tech-sites are more alike than different..The BIT reviewed the "latest-greatest" hardware/software, and still do..
The Bit-forums, that is another story..2-years ago I looked @ more than a few before starting my first project-log here..The reason, this was the BEST-place to be..The format and the people..The people are still here..it's a format that has changed..

 

That doesn't sound too hard to implement - merging threads is already implemented, but as you say, it might be a bit chaotic - although I think it ought to be (fairly) easy to do (if not implemented retroactively).

- H.

 

Yeah should be fairly straight forward, just need to change the sql to include "where author = 'xxx'" when getting the posts. A simple variable in the query string will be enough to flag whether or not to add this.

The thing is though it is going to be a hard task to combine the current threads in the logs/discussions sections. In fact, I wouldn't like to be the one who has to think up a way of doing it! It is very very messy! It is a lot of work, especially if after a month everyone decides that no it hasn't worked, let's split them up again!!

 

Just a quick side note - it seems that many of the day to day articles are about various video games. I know that many many of the readers are heavy gamers, but I just don't game that much any more. It's the hardware I'm interested in, not what new titles are out now. And, I'm not saying that you should get rid of the game articles - but right now, it seems like more than a third of the articles are about games unless there is an event like CES or something going on.

This is just a small niggle though, and not a big thing.

 

I think it wouldn't too hard to make an experimental section, or to try and implement it back into the original PL archives just to see how it works. Though I'd truly hope they do a forced five posts/page in author-only mode just so you don't go into killer bandwidth picture overload.

 

Just start playing WOW like everyone else.

 

I havent been here long, and Im probably the problem too. I dont remember the "old Bit-Tech" that some of you speak of, I did a little looking on archive.org, but I like the reviews, some of the news, ect. I dont like the seperated modding/disscussion threads but there are 2 good remedys to that problem disscussed in this thread. The mods are doing a decent to pretty damn good job here, I only see a few free ipod links and what not. I can see what some people are talking about saying that there are no new or orriginal mods but thats because some of those are just pictures of someone building an off the shelf pc with off the shelf mods. There are some good mods though, personally I think mrwillywonka has a really good one but thats because Im a HL fanboy, theres some other good ones too. I like nexxo's beast too, overkill but I still like it. I see some people come and go like some people have been saying, I have never seen a post by some of the mods here and have seen 2 people just plain leave, offended or other reasons.

I can see a community here, its probably loosened from what people say it once was but its still there. I see 2 parts to this site, the forum and the site itself, the site dosent have any completely revolutionary mods, there are a few good ones. I see all these pre-modded cases and think that sucks, no individuality, no creativity, no skill at all needed to do that. Then a lot of people are asking all the ps questions. If Nvidia says get a 350w get a ****** 350w ps, come on people, if your worried just go a little overkill and get a 500w just to be safe. I think a wiki although hard to impliment would eliminate a lot of these problems. And since Im on the topic of the forums, its all what you put into it, the mods should just be there to clean up the free ipods. I have no problem with the SD forum, when people can carry on a coherent debate. And theres no problem with taking light jabs at each other, those tend to get out of hand with some people. I could say you suck to 100 people and some of those will take it the wrong way and punch me, and some would see that Im joking around. I tend to be serious as little as possible and I dont care about most things. Im tired and thats my little rant.

And the competition idea is a good one.

edit: These are the worst http://www.bash.org/?14207

 

Hey guys,

The guys on bit-tech have been watching this thread for the last week. We haven't really contributed anything of much value, because we wanted to see what all of you guys had to say so we could take everything into account. We're now coming back with some replies to the points you guys have all made.

A lot of you are saying things that are pretty reasonable, and are things that we've also thought for a while. Some of the things that have been mooted here we've just LOL'd at for various reason. However, we agree with you guys that some things need to change, and we'd like to talk about them now and explain the reasoning behind some of the things that have happened over the past six months or so.

Grab a cup of tea, because this is going to be a long post, and you should read it all.

Project Logs
We're going to change PLs back to the original format we had them in. We made a change based on requests from the community to fix the problems we all saw in the original format. However, it turns out that the new format doesn't work so well, so we're going to go back to how they were. We'll be merging threads in the new forum with their relative discussion threads.

We'd really like to implement a 'show by original author' setting, but VBulletin doesn't support that. We could possibly hack something together, but hacking doesn't help with security, and bit-tech is a constant hacking target - so we'd rather not mess with the forum package in that way.

In the long term, we are currently speccing out the most insane method for doing Projects that you have ever (not) seen. That's going to take a while for us to code up from scratch, but stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy the (old style) logs.

Community Spirit
One of the things that's been repeated has been a feeling that the community has gone a bit downhill. There are various reasons - too many noobs, not enough mods, not enough community stuff on the front page, etc etc.

To address this, we are going to put together a 'Community TaskForce'. RotoSequence has kindly agreed to head up the team, and we will be looking for two or three like-minded individuals to help out with this.

Guys on the Force ( ) will have custom user titles and will be community leaders - another type of mod. The existing mods will be in charge of the structure of the forums - making sure people stay in line, threads are in the right place, etc. The new guys will be in charge of the content on the forums - making sure that discussions go well, people get helped out, and that everything else runs well.

If you would like to apply to work on this - if you'd like to be a part of making bit-tech a better forum - PM Roto and let him know.

The guys in the Community TaskForce will also have responsibility for a number of new initiatives, which we'll mention below.

More competitions
You want more competitions? You gottem. We don't have time to think of cool things, constantly be doling out case badges etc - but we're happy to support them. We'll bring back a Competition forum and let the CTs (haha!) manage them. We'll provide case badges, processors, graphics cards... whatever we can get our hands on. If you've got an idea for a competition - whether its a mod, a Photoshop competition, whatever - just let them know and we'll try and make sure that there's always something running for you to win.

Noob forum
One of the major complaints has been that an influx of noobs has taken the enthusiast edge off the main forums. We are going to introduce a 'noob forum' where people can post questions, and we will use that forum to compile noobie FAQs to prevent the same questions being asked over and over again. If you spot a noob question in an established forum, report the post to a moderator and we'll get it moved. This should keep high-level discussion all in one place, and mean that the main forums can gain some hardcoreness back.

Price guides
One of the recurring questions in the forum is 'What should I buy in xxx category for £xxx?' We're going to start running monthly price guides on common components - CPUs, graphics cards, PSUs - giving our opinions on the best buys for your money every month. This should mean that most threads can be pointed towards the relevant guide on the site with the minimum hassle.

More front page
We're going to try and make sure that the best of the forums - the threads, the quotes, the questions, the bargains - get pushed to the front page of the site so that they gain a wider exposure. We value what you guys do in here, and we want to make sure that as many people see it as possible (stay tuned for mod info below).

 

Modding
This is the big one.

bit-tech has sold out! Where are the mods? Why no mods? etcetcetc.

Here's the deal. There are three full time guys working on bit-tech - myself, Tim and Geoff. We all suck at modding. The guys who are the awesome modders - G-gnome, Eddie_dane, Macroman - they all still have their normal jobs and have to fit in their mods around their working and family life.

A lot of things have happened to modding over the past couple of years. It's gone incredibly mainstream to the point where it's almost worthless doing something other than a total scratch built in terms of 'community kudos'. We know this: it's why things like Macro's Creative X-Fi Amp case and WMD are total scratch builds.

For the last year, we've been beavering away behind the scenes on original staff mods. Macro had his Amp case: Macro and Eddie have collaborated on another two cases, which will see the light of day over the next month or so. G-gnome is putting the very finishing touches to WMD: this project has taken more than 18 months from start to finish, many thousands of dollars and more man hours than a lot of you have probably spent working in the last year It's going to be amazing when it comes - but it ain't a quick process.

Fundamentally, modding is no longer a quick process. We can get staff mods on the site, but they can take as much as a year to do from start to finish, maybe more - that's if you want the same 'Wow' factor every time. We keep pushing the bar, raising it, and that's why these things take so long. So when someone makes a genius comment like 'Hey, why don't you guys get Macro to do a mod?' We're sitting here thinking, 'Oh, jeez, we didn't think of that, thanks, yeah right.' Macro has been modding for the last year or so, you guys just haven't seen the results yet.

More staff mods are on the way.

So, if you want regular modding content then we have to look to the community. This has been successful for us - mods like Black Mesa, Hypercube and the like have all been pulled from the forums.

However, this takes a great deal of work. We have to manipulate hundreds of images to format them correctly. Often we're working with guys who don't speak English as a first language, so we have to rewrite pages of text. We don't mind doing any of this - we want to do it because we want mods on the site - but it's not a quick process.

Added to that, we often don't spot the best stuff. We try and keep an eye on whats in PLs, but sometimes we miss something. And when we do something, it might be three or four months before the modder actually finishes it.

So what are we going to do about it?
Here's the plan. We want you guys to help us get more mods onto bit-tech. We know that modding is in our blood, and we really want to see it on the front page. Help us out by:

1) If you see a great mod on another forum, go and tell the modder to post a PL on bit-tech and the CTs know about it.
2) If you see something in PLs that you think should be in the FP, make sure you post in the PL and say so.
3) Comment on PLs - let people know what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong, in your opinion.
4) If you're a modder, do a PL the right way. We're going to be putting together a guide on how to write a good project that will keep people interested, and a way to format it to maximise the chances of your mod getting on to the bit-tech front page.

We are also going to introduce a new Project Logs forum to go alongside the newly amalgamated one - Project Logs Elite. The very best of the best will get in here, as voted or requested by you guys. One of the conditions of entry will be that the log is completed or nearing completion, and is in a format where we can get it up on the site easily. We'll host the images, too, to prevent ImageShack falling over. We're going to put some of the old stuff from the forums and the site up in there as reference - the old Orac and BlackMesa logs, for example.

We might try and put one in every month - as a bit-tech mod of the month - and give away a decent prize for it.

We're really excited and hopeful that this is going to generate some great community interest in modding and some care and attention in maintaining awesome project logs.

Modding Wiki
This is something we've been wondering about for a while, and we feel like now is the time to do it. The last time we ran a bit-tech wiki, it got a little trashed. This time, we're going to keep a tighter leash on it and ask the CTs to make sure that everything that goes in there is appropriate.

We want to collate all the information we can find into the complete encyclopaedia of modding.

The best modders in the world. The best cases in the world. Circuit diagrams. Component reference numbers. Everything in one easy place.

We're going to need you to help us with this. We want to make sure that any time somebody says 'How do I...' the answer is in the Wiki. We're going to put together some guidelines to make sure submissions are put in a a helpful way. To start with, we're just going to set it up on our servers and let you guys get started. If it takes off, then we will put a lot more effort into making it work 100%.


In conclusion
We hope this post gives you some hope that we're not just content to let this community sit, unsatisfied, and slowly peter out. We care as much as we always did about all the things that you guys do - sometimes we just need some suggestions and some help to make the things happen that we'd all like to happen. We sincerely hope that you guys will back us, get behind us, and help to make this place as awesome as we know it should be.

What can you do next?

If you know of a great log, let us know about it. Get browsing Project Logs once we amalgamate them. Go and start a mod. If you've started one, make sure that your pictures are great and your text comprehensible. Get thinking about information to go in the modding Wiki. Put your name forward to Roto to be a CT. Report noob posts to go in the noob forum and be helpful to those guys looking for a hardcore edge to their work. Get your ideas for competitions and your competition entries in.

Most of all, keep reading the forums and keep the community alive

 

WOW, just WOW

I just want to say i'm impressed by the way you guys took all of the complaints, opinions and ideas from the forum members and came up with all those great solutions.

This just proofs that Bit tech is really the place i like to be. A place were people listen to each other and help each other out. I feel that with all the adjustments and new things Bit is going to be even better then it has ever been. This will need the help from all members, and you certainly got my vote

Sometimes dreams do come true


greetz,
Joungne