RolePlayGateway: WeBlog!

Community evolution.

So I’ve been speaking recently with my Programming Structures professor at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Terveen, on the matter of community interaction and evolution, namely on those communities formed with very direct special interests in mind and the deviation from such interests as time progresses. Professor Terveen, a noted figurehead in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (Specializing in collaborative filtering), has spent most of his time monitoring specifically quantifiable components in communities - namely things that involve ratings, recommendations, and such. However there’s also a recognizable qualitative side, mostly related directly to community content itself, that is an interesting subject to look into.

I personally conjectured that pigeonholing online interest groups into those particular interests around which they are formed and making the assumption that such communities rely on the content inherent in those subjects to thrive was somewhat misleading. In my own personal studies on the matter, I’ve carefully monitored the progression and subject matter of two forum communities in particular, one an anime site (Anime-Forums.com, where I once moderated) and the other RoleplayGateway. Taken into account during the examination of each was the movement of interests and subject matter over time, despite the constant funneling inwards of new members constantly while older ones fall away.

A few interesting things came out of it - don’t worry, I won’t be boring anybody with the full details of most of this. But I took careful notice of the fact that both communities would drift towards and away their primary subject matter at relatively even intervals, this also being independent of the overall popularity of that given subject online as a whole at the time. Pretty natural patterns existed for RPGateway, such as the increased focus on subject matter (Namely roleplaying) during number surges. Particularly the RPGateway surges in April-May (I say ’surges’ based on Alexa rankings) were quite noteworthy, the former even more so. Activity was at a peak in the roleplaying section of the forums while the other sections saw decreases in activity, to the point that visiting them was rather misleading as far as gaining a grasp on the level of activity on the site goes. Meanwhile, the anime forum was the complete opposite. Number increases drove focus away from anime towards other unrelated things, although this can be somewhat attributed to the rather stale state of anime popularity during their bigger months, which could be explained through a few phenomena. Gateway also saw a September surge and then consistently higher numbers than normal since, which is expected with most websites that strike at our demographic.

So what exactly useful can be drawn from it? Well, there’s still a matter of cause-and-effect. Are increased numbers tending towards more focus on roleplaying? Or is increased focus on roleplaying producing more traffic? I’d personally like to be of the belief that the former is the more so important relationship here. Member retention and community involvement are absolute keys to success, and it’s pretty evident that interest groups can thrive even as they drift further from those core interests.

For the time being, suffice it to say that we’re heading in a good direction with the idea of expanding community involvement beyond the realm of writing clever posts and playing characters well.
Establish your base first, that’s the way. We all know that we enjoy roleplaying, otherwise we wouldn’t even be on the site in the first place. So let’s see what else brings us together.