Question to Tapology: What is the Future of Tapology's Forums?

I'm making this thread, not to try and troll, but because I feel it is a necessary question to ask.  I was talking with some people who frequent this forum and we noticed that there is a lack of an aura of fun on the forum.  Sure the site itself is growing and the viewing threads are entertaining, but as far as the forum as a whole goes, it doesn't feel like it is as lively like it was when I first started posting regularly.  There isn't many forum games anymore (especially with the long hiatus to BLC).  There isn't any goofy fun threads to just post in.  A lot of the weird characters that used to create mischief are gone or banned.  It feels vacant and is making the forum part of the site feel rather dull, because we as users have nothing fun to do.

I guess my question is: what can we do to make this place more exciting and more compelling to post on?

And as an additional question: is there any new features you as mods can add that would add some interest?

@skelliher  It's a two way street you know.  I'm willing to bring people in if they are willing to post.

This is going to sound awfully arrogant and very ******y (as it should) but part of the reason why the forums are dead is 'cause of me.

You wanna see the rise and fall of Tapology? Read my posts from my first day, until now. Anyone that was on the forums from the time I started posting can attest to a gradual change in my behavior, whether it be in the amount I post, what I said or who I react to. I grew up.

I'm Tapology's child. I joined this site when I was 16 and I was emotional, confrontational, passionate, immature but more importantly, I had a lot of time on my hands and that gave me a lot of time to post. I used to go from thread to thread looking for people to insult just for the sake of it, but I just don't care enough anymore.

The unique personalities of these forums stopped posting, which has lead to Tapology being what it is.

s/o to yorma, Bill Burgess and Kalibibbles: great personalities who contributed a lot to the glory days of Tapology

also s/o to wolf, prime chase & prime Tacos for giving me something to chew on; they helped make this place fun

EDIT: I just remembered the exact end of Prime Anik on Tapology.

All of my years of making fun of every dumbass on this site ended after this post, because that was the absolute pinnacle and it led me to believe that it could never get as good as it was, when mikeyg basically did the forum equivalent of renting out a billboard saying "I AM ANIK'S *****".

So just to be clear, the reason why Tapology's boring as **** now is because of mikey.

* Edited at 04.21.2016, 5:28 PM ET *

Well,whether this is the #1 or #1000 mma site on the internet I don't know.I do know it has the best members and community as far as decent conversations/debates/posts etc. imo.Almost all the members here are great.I helped run the 2nd largest mma site back almost 15 years ago,that was just filled with phenomenal members,but with the evolution of the sport, most forums/sites have ended up with just garbage members,most notably the part time fans TUF brought.I have been a mod or admin at tons of places that I left cause it just went downhill.This is one of the last mma sites left on the internet that hasn't gotten filled with bad members.

Even good members on bad sites,turn into bad members.It's just like a disease lol,they get so sick of ****** posts etc. that they become kinda ****** members and it all just turns into a **** storm.I bet Sherdog has tons of members that would be great if they didn't have to deal with all these idiots and then they end up being on par with them just cause they are sick of it.This site is hands down the best as far as members go,that I have been a part of in many years.I would love to see some certain changes here but i'm ok with whatever.

Tapology is the ****, I have more accounts on here than I can remember.  They generally are for fun.  For example I only log on to my John Lineker account to talk **** to BigE whenever he goes on one of his spells.  Dude still thinks it's really Lineker.

Then whenever we start a new seasonal competition for UFC, I'll make an account specifically for that.  

* Edited at 04.21.2016, 6:52 PM ET *

@GreenHornet it's a fair set of questions. I'll try and give my perspective.

From the day we first opened Tapology to the public, it has been a work in progress. There are literally features that we had drawn up during initial planning that were supposed to be part of the first release, and 5 years later we still haven't gotten to them!  So in a sense when I look at the website, it remains forever incomplete and has holes in it that were never supposed to be this way.  As amazing as the website has become, that's just the twisted way I see it.

The forums are one of the areas where the website is incomplete.  It's not organized exactly how we'd like it to be, and there are missing features that are important to making it flow better and be more engaging to users.

There are plans to make changes to the forums, but those plans need to be balanced against all the other areas of the site that need work and improvements.  Some of the time we're adding new features to different parts of the site, but a lot of the time it's more "boring" stuff like keeping the site fast enough as the load on the servers continues going up.

In the past couple of years, a big part of the effort has been on the FightCenter.  Not just changes to the Fighter/Bout/Event/Promotion/Gym pages that comprise the FightCenter, but on the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that makes the FightCenter work.   Now that we're covering an average of 50-60 events per weekend, it takes a whole lot of systems and processes to make it all work.  There's an entire interface to the website that only the FightCenter editors use, and it needs allow them to do their job quickly and efficiently, otherwise we couldn't get 55 events worth of fight cards and updates managed properly.

As the FightCenter grows bigger and bigger, things that used to be sufficient quickly become insufficient and urgent problems.  For example, when creating a new Bout for an event, we used to have a drop-down list of every fighter in the database, and you'd click the drop-down and scroll alphabetically until you found the correct fighter to insert into the Bout.  It worked fine when there were 1,000 fighters in the database.  It became ridiculous and frustrating when there were 5,000 fighters in the database.  Now there are over 100,000 fighters in the database and it would literally be impossible to add Bouts to the FightCenter.  If we didn't spend our time updating those kinds of systems everything would stop.  Those updates comes at the expense of time going towards other features that we want to be building.

A more recent problem is dealing with requests from fighters, managers, gym owners and promoters.  We are now getting bombarded with so many requests to "fix the spelling of my name" or "here's video of my amateur fight from a bar in Des Moines from 9 years ago" to who knows what else will come over the wire.  And let's just say that when dealing with the global MMA community, the clarity of communication can sometimes be rough around the edges. In order to manage all of it, we need to put systems in place to deal with it, and it takes up a lot of time that isn't very visible to regular users of the website.

The point of all this is just to give some context and explanation for why certain parts of the site have not progressed in terms of features and fixing problems as fast as other parts have.  But that doesn't mean we are never going to do anything about it.   We keep jamming away, and as we get certain things dealt with, it slowly frees us up to make enhancement and changes to other parts of the site. 

New functionality for games and forums ARE going to get rolled out.  I can't give specifics or dates yet, but it will happen.  Until then we appreciate everyone who spends time using all the features of the site... we want to create the most awesome home for MMA we can possibly make and we certainly welcome the feedback and ideas about things we should be doing.

Thanks!

^^^ Can confirm bombardment of support requests from around the world ... every day, all day. 

:)

The great promise of Tapology is that it will never stagnate. It will always evolve. I can promise you that. Greg is the architect of the site, and I know how he operates. We've come a long way, and we haven't scratched the surface of where we're going. 

In the meantime, we'll keep working until we're covering everything MMA the world over. And stuff like the Forums, games, etc. (as Greg said) will come along with that. 

Thanks for taking the time to address my concerns @gregory.  :)

Getting bombarded with requests is actually a good thing. People give a ****! Anyway, we appreciate the clarification, awesome stuff!

"The great promise of Tapology is that it will never stagnate. It will always evolve. I can promise you that."

Unfortunately, that isn't the case with the forum. The forum is dead because it has become beyond stagnant. It has become absolutely redundant. I've seen people who crossed small boundaries get banned/punished and I've seen people who have consistently been banned still hang around and troll. It makes no sense and drives solid posters who actually bring something to the forums away.

I've always been in great support of Tapology, Greg and Skelliher know this. But it's strange to me, your fighter database/fightcenter is the greatest part of this site. You guys possibly have the best database there is and the easiest one to use. There are some regions far superior to others due to the work certain individuals do. Why can't this be done for the forums? No offense, but the sherdog forums are more interesting nowadays with superior information/updates. Why is it that a page with a seemingly superior database not have a booming forum?

"The unique personalities of these forums stopped posting, which has lead to Tapology being what it is."

Great to see a post from Anik and a spot on one at that.

* Edited at 04.22.2016, 1:00 AM ET *

Forum posting is dying. It's happening everywhere. I believe it's just the sign of the times.

This is a great site and it has many great features. The forum is just one of them.

I hate this website for the following reasons:

- the forums suck, they set-up is no good, functionality is terrible, and bill burgess left because of them
- the moderators are way to strict; let us argue, you guys are *****
- the fightcenter hasn't improved since I joined the site in 2011 and there are enough events to make picks
- the fight picks lock when the event starts, who after the walk outs and intro?
- the rankings are flawed and don't even include all of the fighters in the appropriate weight class
- the search engine is worthless, it populates too many fighters names to choose from with the same name
- the news section is out of date, I mean who wants to read news from mma sites?
- the belts system over rated, I should have more points
- the up down system creates drama, if we could see who down voted us we could pick more fights
- the site creators are *******s, they never perform updates, they participate too much in forums, a one of them even liked one of my tweets ...

I down voted you because....yes.

And then I changed my mind and up voted you!

Bill Burgess didn't leave Tapology. He went to teach god about the Baltimore Black Sox history.

you're a terrible fightcenter editor poir and you should down vote me because all of my points are completely relevant.

I'm not sure why I even use this site anymore.

P.s. bIll burgess was the best contrIbutor to tapology ever and should be in the hOf for his unrivaled arguments

sherdog forums still rule the world - at least I can make death threats on there without getting threatened with suspension. UGH

Man I first noticed tapology when I was scouting in 2011 /12 I will never forgive my self for not making an account then .. by now I'd be a fedor-belt!   We all have regrets I know ... TapologY is building and going into the future with the vision sherdog (and other data base sites) started with so long ago .. many people say MMA (UFC) is still in its infancy stages ( I've heard some folk say MMA/UFC is now , where baseball was in the 1930's or something? ) so I think it's fair to say tapology is still in its infancy stages (which is remarkable !) The fighter data base  has great accuracy and clean , easy on the eye design /colors, also the clean design of gym pages with affiliated fighters, locations , phone numbers , listed staff /coaches etc, just puts tap in a league of its own... wait .. All this and we can still PREDICT EVERY MMA Fight /event from Detroit to Singapore ??? And make our own rankings of which contribute to the general rankings of the site ?? And we can talk crap /gibberish on the forums about fights, the future, and Asian avatars and weed ???.. (I'm really grateful I haven't been banned for some of my sh!t spewing sorry about that guys from my heart ..) Man I see a future where UFC events and indeed every event documented on this site aren't  just predicted by a 1500 or 2000 people (in the smaller ones by dozens or several hundred) .. I see future where ee very UFC event here is predicted by over 20 000 people, ssmaller ones predicted by over 5000 or more ! I've been an mma fanatic since I formally disvdiscovered it in 2007, I believe tapology is the future of the online MMA/ Combat sport community from the casuals to the predictors to the debaters /crap talkers (me) , this site has achieved so much and built a general MMA data base of which I see as unrivaled (crazy as it's one of the youngest mma sites), I believe the future is bright for tapology , look around no other site caters to people in such a multitude of ways and it's still the beginning ! (Kinda) , God bless this site , God bless combat sport , and God bless America !! #TapologyNations

@bklettke  your a great guy and  real life  soldier , thank you for serving and protecting America  with honor and dignity ! Sherdog is the original and fore father (and UG) , but tapology is carrying on this proud online mma tradition into the future and adding in some other options mma fanatics like myself could have only dreamed of ! The clean cut data base and affiliation system with the custom rankings system AND predictions of every event with a cash prize for UFC ones (maybe in the future , with growth and prosperity , prizes for seasons of even regional event time lines) tapology is where it's at !

* Edited at 04.22.2016, 11:29 AM ET *