Forums, we have them: January 2010 edition

2:00 PM on 01.03.2010   |   Technophile

32 comments

Welcome, welcome faithful list-

Wait, wrong thing.

Welcome to the January edition of Forums: We have them. If you are reading this it should be the year twenty aught ten. Happy new year Destructoid! I know I could use a break from 2009. It should be an exciting year for games, for the site and for the Forums as well. First off, let's recap what went down last month and give a quick little recap of the last year as a whole. What say you, Destructoid? 

I want to start this by saying that December 19th 2008 was the day I started running shop over there in Forum land and it's been one of the most exciting and fulfilling experiences I've had in a very long time. Thank you to Niero for giving me the opportunity, the staff for being so supportive and especially to the community members who make the Forums home. As some of you know, community is my whole career and you guys have been one of the best communities I've ever had the pleasure of working for. So thank you!

This last month I've been working on quite a few things as I alluded to in my last update. Some of them haven't seen the light of day yet, but you will see them soon. As some of you that happen to use the Redtoid skin on the forums, you may have noticed that we got a whole new set of buttons. One of the many cool things I've gotten from VBulletin.org. If people are interested I can see about getting a green set for Also, Cocks.

I also finally got the first spin out there on the new badges. You can see those here. I'm currently working on a second pass (as you can see in the thread) and I will have those done soon. Speaking of badges, I also downloaded a badge mod and took a look at how that works. It's going to take some tricky installing to get it working, but it should be pretty impressive once I get it all figured out. You will be able to see reasons why you got badges, a showcase on your profile and there is controls to determine which ones show next to your posts.

I've also been doing some adjustment on my test forum. Nothing too radical, but it should make the Forums look a little better. It seems the community is pretty satisfied with how the Forums look and outside of keeping up with the front page and  C blogs, I do not foresee any radical changes to our look. As always, if I decide to upload a new skin, it will be optional and you can use it or not at your discretion.

One of my big pushes for the new year is to get our subscriber base up. If you look over at that little widget on the side of the page that displays the C blogs, you will see the current registered users for the main site. 53,000 + as of this writing! That's amazing. I remember when that number was half that. What makes me scratch my head is our registered users over in the Forums is only 35,000+. That's a difference of almost 20,000 people! That means there are 20,000 people who have at least come over to Destructoid and signed up, but haven't checked out the Forums. That will not do, my friends. It will not do at all.

If you've never been over to the Forums, I think you are missing out on a good portion of the community awesomeness. While myself and the rest of the staff try our hardest to get some of the most awesome stuff up front so everyone can see it, there is so much that one does oneself a disservice by not coming over and checking it out. Picture threads, meetup threads, friday night fight planning, interacting with staff directly and more. Seriously, go check it out and then write a blog about your experience!

So much has happened in the last year in the Forums that I could write 8 blogs about it and I will promise you that I will do everything I can to make the next year even better.

Keep being awesome Destructoid. I'll see you all next month.