Hey, did you know that seven of the subforums in the JCF (always accessible by clicking the handy dandy “forum button” above, right next to downloads) have threads that date back to 2006 or earlier in the first page? Isn’t that interesting? Good. Remember that. We need to get a little bit of El n00berino time out of the way first before the information you just learned can be applied in any meaningful way.
I’m not sure what 6 people found so gosh darned interesting about my journal entry “Future of Future of Jazz: The Blank Edition”. For starters, look at that title. “Future of Future of Jazz”. What!? The post itself was a semi-coherent rambling from yours truly written whilst half-asleep and making some odd connection between the first sentence in the “Post to weblog” description and some very early posts. It asked people to post in the comments what people wanted to see in the Future of Jazz (to date, seven comments have been made. Only one actually followed the given instructions). It was a god awful idea that even admitted in the actual journal post that it was an awful and useless idea, and was further noted as rather useless by the first comment made by resident “Awesome Over-arching Single Player Episode Maker Dude” Evilmike. But despite the fact that it was utterly devoid of quality or much use it somehow got voted up in what I feel was a conspiracy to make me complain for the entertainment of others. Which I just did. I hope you six people are happy if that was your intention. Anyways, ever concerned with the quality of front page news posts (no, for real) I asked if said vile journal entry could be removed from the front page. That somehow led to me writing this entry to replace it.
Now that is not to say “Future of Future of Jazz: The Blank Edition” was well intentioned, its just its execution was quite shoddy. As the old journal post noted theres a perfectly good “The Future of Jazz” subforum at the JCF that could have housed a similar but much more rousing (such is the nature of forums, after all) discussion. Let us get back to that highly interesting fact I mentioned earlier. If you forgot it, please go re-read it and come back down here to continue. I’ll wait (I’ve always found it funny when people pull this kind of stunt in editorials. I’m not really waiting for you at all, I quite possibly don’t even know you) Of those seven subforums Lori Central dates back the earliest featuring a topic that hasn’t been posted in since 2004. Granted theres not much we can do about that, Lori Central is metaphorically a cesspool in the JCF with very little interesting threads created in the past four years. Clan Talk and Jazz Tournaments have threads that date back to 2006. This is excusable – most clans have their own forums, and tournaments really shouldn’t be happening every other day. The latter (i.e.- inactivity for a while is assumed) also excuses the Meetings forum for dating back to 2005. The rules forum also dates back to 2005 but only because posts in the “Content” topic were unrelevant and moved, or relevant but no longer required and thus deleted. Theres also two other threads that date back to 2005 on their respective first page. One is Community Game Development, we can excuse that one since while not a lot of topics are made there the majority of them are quality or as the internet kids like to say “made of win” (did I do that right?) This leaves one subforum out of the aforementioned seven, and the one I will focus on. This subforum is named “The Future of Jazz”.
The description of the subforum reads “Talk about things like JJ3, the 1.25 patch, gameplay variations/additions or anything else having to do with the future of Jazz.” What this apparently means, if the topics are any indication, is “Source code source code source source code, source code we could make JJ3, source code source code. JJ3 Demo link plz thx? Source code.” Very few of the topics in the thread are anything new or interesting, most being derivative threads made by people who didn’t bother to use the search function. This saddens me greatly because it has the potential to spawn interesting threads like some of the other subforums. We’re talking about the future here, people. Can’t we look a little bit past the source code and discuss what lies there instead? A few of the threads (which in turn are the interesting ones worth your time) do just that. Take this call for spreading Jazz Awareness by Violet, or how about this one that in which Onag wrote up a design document for his vision of Jazz? Hey look, here’s one where somebody went out and started working on a possible Jazz 3 instead of just sitting around asking “Hey guys, who wants to make Jazz 3 with me?” and then not actually getting anything done. But these are just mere examples of what you could actually be posting there. How about a thread that asks people to consider what a realistic Jazz Jackrabbit game would look like (although a simplified answer would be very brown, bloom filled, and utter nightmare fuel ) or perhaps a thread that wondered how a Jazz game would play on each of the systems? Now these are rather asinine examples, but you can surely do better than someone writing an Rabbitjournal entry that’s too long for its own good.
One step in improving the community and roping in new members is to have quality posts in already active subforums (so in essence, the complete opposite of the Comedy Cesspool), another step that is equally as important (and the one I just spent way too long building up to) is that realizing and using inactive subforums to their fullest potential (or at the very least something that’s even remotely interesting).
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