Sir Doodle, if you'd come to the help section every once in a while, you would see that Thorfin helps or atleast contributes to helping everyone.
I'm not criticising Thorfin, which is why I didn't make any mention of his post stats. I'm not arguing either side on that particular point between Thorfin and Taboo, just pointing out how the evidence he gives for Taboo and Furdle isn't accurate nor representative of how a user is a boon to the community.
And those statistics are still accurate. Even if they don't reflect everything they have done, it tells ys exactly what topics and subjects interest them.
But what topics interests a person doesn't tell you if they aid/support the community. It's not a good representation of someone's worth to the community.
It would only be good at comparing who is more interested in Blockland, and who prefers non-Blockland things.
But it isn't even representative of that, since it still doesn't take into consideration how much they play. And also the fact that you can be promotive of the game/community but not post it on the forums, or post it elsewhere.
I would go so far to say that it's a petty argument to discuss who is beneficial to the community.
For starters the community has to be the one to decide if you're beneficial, not you yourself.
Then there's the fact that being beneficial to the community doesn't change whether or not you as a person are pleasant or not, and if you're causing problems it won't change that at all, nor public perception of you.
Then consider what people even consider to be an act that is beneficial to the community.Furdle often cites him hosting 'quality' servers. To begin with, 'quality' is subjective. Then consider how many unique users he'll have visit it in the period that he hosts for. Could be a few hundred (given the regular Blockland activity of around about 300 users at any one time), which is a tiny proportion of all the people who play Blockland and are part of the community.
He might entertain some 400 players over a couple of weeks, but does that mean he's really an aid to the entire community?
Arguably servers like Tezuni's or Badspot's are much more of an aid to the whole community, as they're consistently hosted and have had thousands of unique players visit them and enjoy some time on them.
It's generally taken that posting on the forums makes you an aid to the community, so long as you're in the right board.
For the most part the view is that posting in Help makes you more useful to the community.
But in reality, Help is a hardly used board. Any topic in there gets an average of just 159 viewers, much much less than any other board, and much less than you're likely to get with even a moderately popular server.
So now consider that you post in another board, like Off-Topic or Games. On average any topic there is going to get thousands of views, so anything beneficial you do, whether helping out with a problem or even just entertaining or inspiring someone is going to be seen by ten times as many people than if you post in Help, or General Discussion.
If you're going to go on an elitist view and claim that people who post regularly in the Off-Topic Forum aren't useful to the community, then you might as well say the same for people who post in the "Blockland Forums" Forum (Gen Disc, S&R, Dev, Clan, Gallery, Help). Because they make a tiny portion of all the posts on the forums (GD is just 6.99%, while Help is only 2.16%).
And furthermore they get a particularly low volume of visitors, with average topic views in the hundreds (compared to the thousands for other boards).
If you take the above view then the only forum you can post in and be useful to the community in is the Add-Ons and Modification Discussion boards, as they have an average of 8000 views per topic, and are still directly connected to Blockland the game. But the posts in those boards still only makes up 2.05/2.09% of all posts on the Forums as a whole. Would you really suggest that only 2% of the forum community (who are still only a portion of the Blockland community) are in anyway useful to the community as a whole?
And when you get down to it, there's only 19k topics in the Files and ModDiscussion Boards as a whole. So, provided that each of those topics is a useful topic, then that's only 19k guaranteed useful posts from the OPs of those topics.
All the other 20k posts can be completely useless, people just commenting and giving praise, which isn't beneficial to the community in anyway.
Finally, just to really question the common view, why is it that using the Off-Topic Forum is seen as not being productive in the community? This is the largest gathering of members of the Blockland community, and surely being in discussion and chatting and laughing with each other is just as beneficial to the community as anything else?
Surely helping people out in these topics should be seen as just as good as helping a few people out in the Help section?
Here's a spreadsheet I made to pluck the statistics, so you can see what I mean.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CRIkGyYQ3Hu1zH7UrREGHSNVenX0AqO2idMKzGqdNV8/edit?usp=sharingThe averages for view count were gathered from pages 2-3 of each respective board, in order to avoid unfairly picking new recently posted topics, as well as stickied topics.
For especially large topics, particularly old large topics, I've also left a comment detailing the average daily view count, and have included a second average which uses those (it's not perfectly accurate as I didn't use the average daily view count of smaller topics as I didn't want to go and work all that out for every single topic).
Also included are the total topics and posts of each board, forum and total, as well as percentage of total topics/posts for each individual board. (The percentages may not add up exactly to 100% as I have fairly clumsily rounded them down).
