Weekend Warriors: May, Plus a Bone I've had to Pick with Joedios
 

Hey guys, to anyone who cares at this point (if anyone does), I'll be quitting WW here after this month unless a significant increase in participation happens. I know I sneaked in a few joke weekends last month, but no one's been paying attention for awhile (hence why I pulled the prank in the first place).

I'll be honest, doing this isn't a lot on my part at all. But I won't even bother with that much seeing as how no one participates besides the occasional shot from one of my good buddies at Flickr. And I don't feel bad ending it either since we're doing Weekend Warriors there now and we have a blast too.

I could rant some, but to get to the point, this place is changing for the worse. Members here don't want to participate unless they can gain some sort of "lookit me!" status for posting... crap shots. Things like Weekend Warriors, Target Range, other little things we all used to have fun doing together just don't happen here any more. Heck, forget these events, it's rare you even see a shot with 10+ replies here anymore. When I joined, just about anything that wasn't 25th figures on a couch with flash turned on got that much.

Well anyways you bunch of apathetic goons, here's the theme's for May.

April 29th - May 1st: Crossovers
Because the photos section just doesn't have enough Marvel, Halo and DC pics as it is!

May 6th - 8th: Traitors
Post up the shots of the dirty backstabbing jerks in you Joe-verse. Or your Marvel, DC or Halo since apparently most everyone prefers all that.

May 13th - 15th: Casualties
With every fight there are losses, great or small.

May 20th - 22nd: Troop Builders
It's been popular every time we've done it, and I did want to fit this one in again.

May 27th - 29th: Final Missions
Sometimes you just don't know if you can make it out of certain situations, and sometimes those situations could be a final mission. But it could also be the battle that decides who wins in a long conflict.

Good themes. I've got a few ideas already.
Hope we can get some participation going.

ow, it's really bad that you can't follow up the tradition, I mean, the greatest obstacle of them all is that very few help by participating. I said this 'cause I love when there's cool themes and many put their creativity to the test, I love seeing that awesome work. But I can't complain, given that I've only participated 2 times in 5 months, and in a way I'm ashamed with myself because I really could have participated in various weekends, but either I forgot (like last ninja weekend or the crossovers) or feel lazy to make a quick set or start posing.

What about a small weekend warriors comitee? hehe, that only have to comunicate one day a month to decide the themes for the entire month or something like that. one or two willing people that want the charge? any? :p

How about if I promoted these threads to the front page? More visibility?

If you want me to, please edit your post to make it more of a challenge than an insult, and I'll promote it up! :)

Hey Hammer, thanks for responding.

See, the thing is this might've been nice if you'd offered this around two months ago when participation dropped off. Even then though, what's the point if you have to force people to do it? So I will decline, no, I do not want to edit my post and no, I don't want it on the front page.

It's not a challenge to save Weekend Warriors either. I'm just saying that if people don't start coming on and actually doing this thing there's no point in having it or organizing any other such event.

I also want to clarify that I'm not making a generalized statement about everyone here, many of the members here a great folks. It's just that it seems to me that a lot of the newer members have little or no interests in participating. If you need proof look at the dwindling amount of commentators and sudden lack of participation with this once the older members get run off. Everyone that's left only wants to post their own pictures and their own ideas without giving anything back.

Most of the posts I ever made were for the Target Range weeks. Not that it is gone I just don't pull out the figures anymore. Which sucks because I got a nice camera and took Photography classes for the point of doing more shots but just don't. I have also noticed that thread participation has dropped with as few as one or two posts a day most of the last couple weeks. I know since all the crazyness that went down about 6 months ago with all the in fighting I have pretty much become just a lurker here commenting when I see fit. It really took the fun out of the sight and even though I see some great shots put up, its just not the same. I collect Marvel Universe, and MOTUC figures but don't like seeing them on this sight. Maybe one day soon I will get back to taking photos as I have a Dio story about 1/4th finished involving the red shadows that I would love to post up here but as for now I just Lurk and see if things change. Good luck with WW and I hope it gets more participation but if It doesn't, let it die and don't dwell. I know I don't about Target Range. Matter of fact I had forgotten about it until a picture of mine was randomly on the front page a couple days ago.

You know, I've visited joedios.com almost daily for several years now. And I don't think "this place is changing for the worse". Things now are not radically different than in the previous years.

Okay, so lately the average quality of pictures seems to have dropped a bit. And perhaps there are less comments per picture. I have no doubt those two statements are connected. But have you noticed there are quite a few new names among the people posting pictures ? And surely you noticed there are still good pictures being posted, and those pictures still get more comments than others.

This is all just part of some sort of natural cycle on joedios.com, that's happened in the previous years too. Some older members quit, others come on board. And those new posters perhaps still need to grow a bit. But as long as better pictures get more comments, that will be a motivator to improve, and before you know it there is a new generation of prolific members that post great pictures.

As for the participation in Weekend Warriors, yes, I know, I'm guilty. When you picked it up, I participated a lot, and then winter happened and I couldn't go outside anymore to take pictures. But you know, Weekend Warriors, in several incarnations, has also come and gone a few times on this site, and it has always been like that; a lot of participation in the beginning, and then less and less, until the frustrated organizer gives up, and a few months later someone else picks it up again.

Plus, don't forget, many people that visit this site to view or post pictures, never go to the forum, so they may never find out about Weekend Warriors. It's not like the forum is the primary focus of this site. It's not exactly hyper-visible from the joedios.com home page either, more like a hidden feature. And if someone does click on that forum link, by default only the last month of posts are visible, so they will miss a lot of the history and it won't be easy to "get into it". In other words, the forum, its community, and thus Weekend Warriors, are irrelevant to the vast majority of the visitors of joedios.com.

And finally, Flickr. I suppose it's only natural that Flickr would leech away some people from joedios.com. You said it yourself; apparently there's a Weekend Warriors going on on Flickr too, so surely that is a cause of less participation here on joedios.com. But don't worry, in time, it will fade out over there just like it does over here. And perhaps then someone will say: "I don't mind giving up on Weekend Warriors here, because we're also doing it over on joedios.com, and there a lot more people are involved than here on Flickr".

Word

Hope you don't mind me cutting this down just to what I'm referring to.

First, if people don't visit the forum, that means almost no one's reading the forum rules! Which could be something, but I don't think that many people aren't reading the forums. I just think that newer members feel they have no need to participate with anything but themselves, and so far nothing's being done to change that.

Onto Flickr, it is in no way taking from the people who participate here. No way, at all, whatsoever. Participation here had dropped off for awhile before I started it on Flickr, and the people who are doing it at Flickr now are the same folks who had been doing it here before they got pissed with one problem or another. I wouldn't have been so vocal about all this if I didn't know there's others who think like me.

I've got to say that better publicity for a given weekend's theme would be good, and it would also be pretty cool to be able to view the entries for each of the past weekends (this may already be possible using tags on the photos I don't know - but if this is the case it might be worth sticking up a non-editable sticky post with links to the topic and photos that were submitted.)

Certainly a while back there seemed to be far more excitement about a given weekend/event's photo topic with threads discussing in the forum, but I've not noticed that recently.

So with all that said I've never contributed, but I will certainly have a go now as I do enjoy looking at other people's photos.