Nue22 2023-11-27 18:12:13

They must be doing something right because we're still browsing this hell-hole.

JosephStarr 2023-11-29 18:53:04

It's been a LONG time since I've seen a PM or any notification on here, so this surprised me. It's like receiving a text message from a ghost.

Most of my experience was in the General Forum and the Art Portal, and I watched them change over the years.

The general forum stayed the same for a long time. The layout, the userbase, the atmosphere, ect... and it was fine. Then the 2020s came around and that's when things started to change imo.

We got new users. Okay. That's a good sign.
Alot of them were younger, so were we when we found this place.
Some of them posted personal stuff, and people were supportive.
Sometimes the forums would feel almost wholesome.

BUT FOR SOME REASON the personal rivalries and disagreements between older users became nastier at the same time, and even I got dragged into that nastiness occasionally despite hating that sort of crap. It killed the vibes man.

It's sad.
I've seen enough small communities fizzle out into nothing.
I genuinely love small online communities, they're more comfortable.
And General was on it's way up with new users.
But I guess there weren't enough good people in our city of Sodom.

Occasionally I'll stop into the videogames forum, but it's nowhere near the same atmosphere.

thepixelizer 2023-12-01 13:01:39

Yeah it sucks that general is gone, and the site doesn’t look too unique anymore. But at least everyone is still here for the most part.

Tom just got fed up with all of the rule breaking like people posting subliminal porn and making spam topics, let’s look at it from Tom’s perspective the general forum was the most used forum on the site meaning it took up the most data.

And everyone was just using it for a chat room to talk about nothing important.
Every spam topic was costing Tom actual money on plus he had to pay for all of the data for the content uploaded to every portal for over 20 years straight.

We’ve already heard Tom’s posts about it’s expensive to keep this site running, and general was like the flash portal with no blamming or whistles just a bunch of spam and content with very little effort put into it.

Sure we don’t have the same sense of community anymore but wouldn’t you say we did this to ourselves? I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did, he had a huge amount of patience with us, he was complaining about the state of that forum for months.

What I take from this is a lesson to appreciate what you have before it’s gone.

I also did like the big Newgrounds redesign too but it took forever to load! I prefer the speed of the new one more. Sure it was pretty; but looking at the same images time and time again would get old eventually.

I do miss the tank and orange button, but it would look retro in 2023. But at least now we can customize our profiles that wasn’t a thing before.

colorsCrimsonTears 2023-12-05 14:12:48

Do you still log on here?
Anyway, check out this page. It's one of the few that still use the older design

https://www.newgrounds.com/calendar/

ProjectAnarchy 2023-12-07 15:09:38

@thepixelizer I get your point, but text weighs nothing. I'm willing to bet the entirety of the forums would fit on a 32gb usb stick.

guyfromKillerRAT 2024-09-03 02:55:22

@colorsCrimsonTears

I am genuinely annoyed. They "fixed" the calendar page.

colorsCrimsonTears 2024-09-03 12:02:05

@guyfromKillerRAT yeah... It's kinda upsetting that everything had to get changed, when it's well known how much the old design was liked. We could at least have one or two pages stay that way, but oh well.

Tsarfield 2024-09-06 08:01:59

yeah im gonna be honest i mostly used this site for the forums a lot of the content this site churns out now is kinda mid

Cyberdevil 2024-10-22 07:02:24

@colorsCrimsonTears https://www.newgrounds.com/gameswithmedals

Best not let them find this one...

Cyberdevil 2024-10-22 07:08:58

@ProjectAnarchy the images are bound to eat a fair share of space though, not as much as other content here, but I'd reckon the total BBS size is at minimum a few hundred GB in size. Consider ~20,000,000 posts, multiple images/post allowed, art and image-specific topics, plenty of memery outside of those, bigger images would take at least around ~1MB each after compression, just a million images at that size = 1 TB. I don't think that's an issue in the bigger scheme of things, a single 1080p mp4 can easily be a gig or more, just saying, it's probably still quite a bit.

Cyberdevil 2024-11-27 04:53:51

@colorsCrimsonTears They got that page too -_-'

colorsCrimsonTears 2024-11-27 12:22:36

@Cyberdevil Sad that this is what made me finally see a notification again. Man that sucks. I get wanting uniformity for the website, but knowing how much people love and feel nostalgia for the old design, they could let us have one or two of the old pages. It's not like they're hurting anything.
Also, what's up Cyberdevil? It's good to see you around.

Cyberdevil 2024-11-27 13:19:20

@colorsCrimsonTears Indeed... there's gotta be some page still using the old layout floating around still, but nothing I can find now, though if you want to go REALLY old layout: https://www.newgrounds.com/cat/

Life's p good right now. :) Just got back from the beach in Barcelona. How 'bout you?

colorsCrimsonTears 2024-11-27 14:36:35

@Cyberdevil to be honest, beyond just the layout, NewGrounds feels a LOT different than it did just a few years ago. Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't feel quite as lively as before. I still adore the place though. I wish I had more time to post, but I'm a lot more busy than before, combined with a decline in interest from people in what I create, so I've been inactive in content creation for a few months now. Beyond that, things are pretty ok irl, although nothing too noteworthy. I am looking forward to Thanksgiving though, it's the time of year where you can overeat without judgement lol
I hope the Barcelona trip was a good time!

Cyberdevil 2024-11-29 12:10:42

@colorsCrimsonTears yeaah I agree! Since General closed it feels like the impression of an active community died down a bit, even if it didn't it's like it gives the impression that community discourse isn't really encouraged, or that it's paywalled into the Supporter Lounge, or like staff giving up on such a central outlet on the site may lead to other closures and decreases. But maybe user activity is shrinking too, maybe things are changing otherwise also...

Ah Thanksgiving's a thing we miss out on over here, wish we had that too! Hope you had a good one. Barcelona was really nice, it's a beautiful place: https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/5da37379286ec904c4f1633dabb941c6

...although they don't seem too happy about tourists there these days: https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/4aa62cc3aff77bdb80ef86aa8b2c2624

Hope you get back some inspiration for content creation too, shall bookmark for future reviews whenst more time ensues; some of that interaction fueled inspiration...

Cyberdevil 2024-12-01 12:16:38

@guyfromKillerRAT yeaah I wonder how many visitors a year that particular street crossing usually gets XD... apparently Barcelona get a lot of folks from the UK particularly, who get pretty wild at night. Bigger problem seems to be the housing market though. They purchase apartments there just for vacationing purposes too, raising housing costs/demand for the locals considerably.

But for the economy overall: definitely not a bad thing with tourism.

Cyberdevil 2024-12-04 12:07:16

Ah it's a thing there too! I suppose it's a thing worldwide really, most exotic spots eventually get exploited for their resources, be that nature or sun or what have you, though I really would've thought it was the other way around. As in everybody wanting to move to California; leading to housing prices there just going insane. Maybe that's been a phase though? Or how it's always been there?

Oregon Trail might've been the first game I ever played in school btw, fun times. :)

As for the drugs, are you allowed to actually do drugs in public though? Read up a bit on Barcelona earlier, and for example weed is legal for medicinal purposes there, but illegal in public spaces. Seems like a similar kind of restriction with any drugs you've legalized would be a good thing to have. Just like they've banned regular smoking in public places over here. People still do, but not so much. Probably an easier restriction to implement when the stigma of tobacco being bad for you's been so popularized, which doesn't seem to be the case with all drugs, but yeah... public spaces should be a bit more restrictive IMO. Personal spaces: I'm all for freedom there. As long as you aren't harming others. Synthetic drugs seem like a growing problem everywhere otherwise, but I think it's a reflection of contempt for government and society overall more than a problem with the substances themselves. If we had a more inclusive; inspiring world, fewer would look for ways to escape it.

lmao XD Insight from elsewhere in the world's always nice to get though! Overall... seems we have problems everywhere, not the same ones to the same extent, but like you can't escape the issues with our current world order anywhere, we need to... do something.

Listened to a podcast with Argentina's new president recently though, and that guy's inspiring. He brought a chainsaw with him on election campaigns, as a symbol of really cutting through the old ways, the corruption; all that stuff. And the country's flourishing now... hope we get a wave of leaders that actually care, and try to make some positive changes everywhere.