- x Foman123 x
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Yes, the Classifieds Forum is clearly useless as a way to attract members. It is, however, extremely useful as a way to divert spam from the main forums. Which, if you ask me, is its primary purpose. Threads advertising groups in the wrong forum are frequent, but not nearly as bad as they would be in the absence of a Classifieds Forum.
The reason that nobody visits the Classifieds Forum is because so few people join groups at all, there is no reason to. The primary reason to visit the Classifieds is to advertise a group that you just made. The numbers of Bnet users in groups are not just small -- they are ridiculously miniscule. Look at the Iris campaign -- 80 million people came into some kind of contact with the ARG or Halo 3 through Iris alone. Hundreds of thousands had some kind of involvement in the ARG. Yet the largest dedicated group of players to Iris anywhere -- which happened to be on BNet -- never cracked 4000 members. Despite the extremely convenient presence of a private group, the vast majority of ARG players got all of their IRIS content through the public forums and the public websites such as WikiBruce.
The numbers are just as staggering even if you look only at BNet. One million active users on BNet and yet no group contains more than 3950 members. That's 0.04%. Granted, many users are not in that particular chapter, but even Achronos has mentioned that the percentage of group users is tiny. He mentioned that the best thing that a user who wants more group functionality can do is to USE the groups, which gives the Web Team the appropriate justification to start working on them. That's why I am in 18 groups and try to swing by all of them once a week, if not every day.
It's a vicious cycle -- a large problem that indirectly affects the Classifieds is the functionality of groups. The thing that most people find coolest about groups is not the gathering of like-minded people in a more intimate environment -- it is the ability to play God. Therefore, it's no fun to join a group if you are just a "regular member" unless the discussion or people there are extremely cool. It is much more fun to start your own group with whatever member titles you want and the delicious power to lock threads and ban people on an arbitrary whim. And a large portion of regular BNet members have done exactly that.
As a side note, after seeing how some members act in their private groups, I am often not surprised at Achronos's hesitation to promote new moderators -- that, combined with the trust issues on BNet.
Anyway, once you advertise the group you created in the Classifieds and nobody joins it, the fun of playing God wears off and you're left with a group that plays the same old forum games and spams. You might get people together for a game or two, but rarely anything regular for anything except dedicated clans.
Hopefully group functionality returns with something to give greater incentive to people to join groups, whether those groups be Chapters or Clans. When and if that happens, you will see the Classifieds become much more robust.
As for now, no the Classifieds are not useless at all, as they provide a welcome repository for group advertisements that would otherwise clog and choke other forums.
[Edited on 01.01.2008 3:51 PM PST]