Query about community size

[AppleQueso]

It makes no sense to me that Racketboy is this small in number of average users. Its mainsite articles, quality of the forum, and contributors in general are of the highest quality I've ever seen.

It's pretty implicit to me, it's impossible for a bigger site to have a high quality. The wider your appeal, the lower is your common denominator, so as to speak.

This. Even well moderated places like NeoGaf suffer these sorts of problems.

Racketboy is "just right" I think. Active enough that you always have something going on, and small enough that you pretty much know everyone's face. In bigger forums, your posts often just get lost in the rabble.

Seems to me that more active communities more readily attract trollish types too, since they'll get more immediate reactions on faster paced forums where you're less likely to be as familiar with all the regulars.

[Gunstar Green]

I post on Racketboy and Sega-16 and lurk HG101. The bigger forums are just too hard to keep up with and are almost impossible to hold meaningful conversations in since you never get to know anybody.

[Luke]

Since I only post at two sites (well, one since the other is defunct) I don't know the douche/troll to decent people ratio, but RB seems to attract mostly intelligent people who have a passion for vintage games, and in whole, art.

Mods are smart enough to ban those who should be banned within a correct amount of time, and show a tolerance for a "forum learning curve". As I need less games, I tend to post more about movies than anything else, but Together Retro is great at revisiting games that I should already be playing.

Great group of guys here and although sometimes I'm brash and outspoken, there isn't a guy or gal here who hasn't eventually became a pal (even elmagicochris took me off his foe list). Also, it is also great to see kids appreciate "retro games", even if it is just because it is a fad.

I haven't been in the B/S/T thread in a while, but besides the occasional hiccup it seems to be well oiled. And when the shit does hit the fan (DC4eava) it is quite hilarious. Hate to say it as people got screwed over, but the entire girlwife posts of DC having a heart attack was one of the funniest events I've ever read that transpired on the internet. Definitely the funniest thing I've ever read on a forum, in spades.

[J T]

To be fair, over half the users at IGN are only there because they're still waiting for a page to load that they clicked on in 2002.

[Dakinggamer87]

It makes no sense to me that Racketboy is this small in number of average users. Its mainsite articles, quality of the forum, and contributors in general are of the highest quality I've ever seen. I am an IGN, GameTZ, Underground Gamer, BitGamer, NintendoAge, SHMUP, KLOV, and regular vistor of many other gaming forums. I play all varieties of games and consoles (look at my signature for my collection of consoles) but have a warm spot in my heart for the Racketboy and the community at large.

Maybe I am biased but the unbiased focus of the site and forum is what is most appealing to me. Here we cover retro, modern, nintendo, sega, neogeo, art, culture, personal experiences, opinions and everything else in between like no other site does! I want Racketboy to be successful with regards to making it profitable well past its server costs but I don't mind if it remains niche, culture rich community.

To sum up, it blows my mind more people don't catch on to the greatness happening here.... but at the same time I love truly the quality and quaint community we have had in the past and still right now.

Well said couldn't agree more!!

[foxhound1022]

I definitely can say that I enjoy the somewhat close-knit feel of this place as opposed to the other forums that I only browse from time to time.

Being as I am still relatively new to this community, I feel safe in saying that I am getting to know the people on here and I would hope that you guys could reciprocate that as well.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I definitely can say that I enjoy the somewhat close-knit feel of this place as opposed to the other forums that I only browse from time to time.

Being as I am still relatively new to this community, I feel safe in saying that I am getting to know the people on here and I would hope that you guys could reciprocate that as well.

Yeah, I am also getting to know the various members of the forum, and I have discovered all of them to be fine, trustworthy individuals. At the same time, I hope that none of them get to know me particularly well, because the more people get to know me, the more they will come to realize that I am a complete jerk.

[Forlorn Drifter]

I used to also have an account on Neoseeker, but I eventually just quit posting. Besides the occasional big game or two (the last two being Skyrim/Borderlands 2), most of the forums are dead or untouched. Thousands of members, but the only other active forum besides AAA games was social. It felt desolate and unloved.

I then found racketboy looking for some questions on what some Gamecube games would be worth for selling price. It made me rethink the whole thing, decide to keep the Gamecube, and revealed to me a nice, tight knit community that I could pretty easily join. I like that its small, but constantly active. I've never had a question go unanswered, and there is always an expert or someone who can direct you to an expert. I love it.

(I'm also happily impressed with how well everybody deals with me. I'm a bit of a shithead on occasion, so I like that people can deal with that. I just hope I never become as bad as a couple of banned members...)

[Zing]

Is it crazy that NeoGAF has 85,000+ members

NeoGAF is just far too large. It's cool that it's so active, but any thread that isn't posted to every day instantly gets pushed back to page three. There is so much going on, all crammed into one sub-forum, that it's hard to keep up. Every thread created is instantly pounced on. I doubt I will ever create a thread there because there is a higher chance of it dying in obscurity within hours, or being trolled to death, than ending up as a topic of sincere discussion.

Although, I'd rather have it that way, than end up like the DigitPress forums, which are fairly desolate now, except for the occasional interesting thread. The rest are just reposts of news or topics that were already discussed the prior day somewhere else.

[Zing]

I used to also have an account on Neoseeker

Until just last night, I honestly believed that Neoseeker was just one of those copy/paste bot sites that jams tons of text into every page, desperately trying to get Google search hits. I had no idea there was genuine content there.