Future Direction of the Forums?

[Don_Dan]

Charles, what happened to Wamps?!

[Sparky]

The entire F@H forum seems to be missing too... I thought maybe it got moved into the DC vault since there isn't much activity in there anymore (kinda sad, that was my original DC project) but it is just gone.

[Charles Wirth]

Wamps will be back Monday, on vacation.

[youngpro]

id love to see XS back to its former glory

i think much of this can be attributed to social networking..

back in the day, when you got a record, you post on XS, no where else matters,

these days its hwbot and link on facebook, the community has moved with the general movement away from forums and to mobile based communications

however it would be great is xs was the same sharing location as it was in 2010 and earlier, good luck

[Don_Dan]

The decline of activity on the forum is due to many reasons. On the one hand, the enthusiast community of hardcore overclockers is shrinking. The small group of high-end ( pro ) overclockers is strong as always, so is the community of "casual" overclockers and gamers, who overclock their gaming machines, run a benchmark once or twice, and are done with it. If you look at other enthusiast forums, this trend manifests as well, OCX forums is gone, k|ngp|ncooling forums are really quiet these days, the forums that are doing well today are those with a strong gaming community. I'm not sure if we can stop this trend and get more activity of the gaming crowd, XS was never strong in the gaming department. Then, as James said, only few people post their scores in forums today, they are posted on HWBot and shared on Facebook. I really miss the days when there were lots of threads in the Xtreme Overclocking section, as I like looking at a thread and seeing all the scores that were achieved during one session. It's also a good place to get more (background ) info and discuss the results. I see lots of other people complain about this as well, but it's up to everyone to post their scores in the forums.
On the other hand, restricting forum access of new members and demand a few was a also bad idea in my opinion, though I understand why it was introduced and I know that it served well to reduce spam. Today I think registration should be opened up completely as I would rather see more new members and remove some spam along the way.

Other things that need to be taken care of:
- Lots of things are broken and need to be fixed, including the euro-symbol, other symbols, the View Forum Leaders at the bottom of the front page is still broken too

- Personally I'm entirely against the removal of subforums, they should be locked but left accessible for future reference. Those subforums that have been removed should be brought back imho, old distributed computing projects that are no longer active should become subforums of the general Xtreme DC Vault ( like D2OL, Dimes, F@H ). Wamps needs to be brought back as well. I'm also against the merger of Xtreme Bandwidth and Xtreme Overclocking, those subforums are completely different and although they might see less activity today, there are still thousands of old threads in each of the subforums.

- There is a Bitcoin subforum inside the Xtreme DC Vault, in my opinion it should be renamed to Cryptocurrency and moved out as a separate subforum inside the Xtreme Teams subforum

- A lot of members of staff are no longer active, they should be removed and become members of other user groups ( if they aren't already ), either XIP or XL depending on what they've done. If they haven't got a special user title yet, they should get "Retired Staff". Afterwards, more new staff like me, Oj101 and Ace123 should be appointed.

- The subforums of the Xtreme subforum should get a new order, move Xtreme News up and Xtreme Virtual and Augmented Reality down. The XS News Staff should be brought back, maybe five dedicated News writers that write news articles and moderate and amend news articles written by other members. I'm thinking of members with different native languages, that could also translate news articles from their native languages to english.

[Buckeye]

I think I agree with everything you said Don.

[BeepBeep2]

Same!

[n00b 0f l337]

Afterwards, more new staff like me, Oj101 and Ace123 should be appointed.

I think I agree with everything you said Don.

And all of the above. Good idea on retired staff. We probably need a revamp there and see what sections people are actually monitoring or in charge of.

Good point on subforums and preserving the old knowledge, it's a must because it's what brings people to the site from the search engines.

Of course if you need a hand with anything I'd be happy to help, as would I'm sure a ton of the rest of us.

[WangChung]

Everything that Serra said, 100%

There's nothing "Xtreme" about throwing money at Storage. I haven't seen anyone OCing their RAID cards, and even my RAIDing SSHDs when Seagate says not to is just "neat" at best. It didn't need to be broken out of General Hardware; the people that were into it knew right where it was and the section hasn't seen a noticeable uptick in traffic.

Having a "karma" or "thanks" ratio or some such for users gives a subconscious goal to make a worthwhile, insightful, or significantly informative post rather than keyboard diarrhea. I would definitely say bring that back.

That's all I got for now.

[v0dka]

I would like to join in with a few obeservations as well.

On the social media thing. The core of XS - in my opinion - is the amount of experience that is being shared in overclocking current and past gen hardware. This is something that doesn't work on social media. You need a forum to do that, with good attachment and formatting features. Forums are king when it comes to sharing detailed information and not just little bits of information (aka the Facebook post). I understand that the extreme overclockers are into sharing their records on social media, but it's not a serious source of information like the Intel and AMD forums are / were. Social media cannot replace XS in that regard. So there's your unique selling point.

The fact that many thousands (see FUGGER's post) of hits come from search engines kind of prove my point. If you're getting into specific hardware, BIOS settings, batch numbers, etc. good chance you'll end up here.

The excellent watercooling forum and the - less visited - chiller, LN2 / DICE forums are just logical attachments of the overclocking activities. XS should try to expand the activity in the general overclocking forums, and traffic will trickle down into the other forums automatically.

That being said, the cpu overlocking game has changed from my personal experience. I'm still using a W3570 at 4.07Ghz (not 4.70Ghz ) that I got from here, what, 4 years ago? It does everything I want it to and doesn't need more speed and I don't need more cores. I have only invested in GPU's the last four years. SSD's too. The rest remains at it was in 2010. It's all very different from the good old A64 days where you took a low clocked single core and added 50% clock speed. Between the huge performance of i7's and their turbo frequencies overclocking has become less meaningful.

So some form of decline is to be expected and is a normal consequence of the hard- and software industry at the moment. Gaming has been an important catalyst for overclocking, and games have not pushed the hardware needs all that much the last few years. Maybe the new gen of consoles opens up possibilities. The hobby of overclocking remains though, and everyone who owned high end stuff in the last 5-10 years will continue to clock, post and search for information. It's just that the frequency at which people need to get new hardware and jumpstart these activities decreased. At least that's how I see it. Maybe I'm jut getting old and easily content with current performance though.

[Charles Wirth]

Wamps is back, made a few changes to registrations. getting the front end restarted on the other server.

[Don_Dan]

Zero threads, zero posts and a password required to enter it?

[[XC] Lead Head]

Three new members in about a week. Hope they can post.

[Charles Wirth]

I cleared 33 people today, not 3

[Don_Dan]

Zero threads, zero posts and a password required to enter it?

Wamps is still broken!

[Cov(enant)]

Hi, there are no plans to add a Mini iTX section to the forum? Just asking.

[NKrader]

Hi, there are no plans to add a Mini iTX section to the forum? Just asking.

SFF section would be a good idea

[Black Phoenix]

I hope that everything at least returns to half of what it was when I joined this forum (2006).

It's true that the times were different in 2006. To be sincere, I've been retired from the OC world for too much, since 2008 to 2013 because of my full time work. Since the beginning of this year I've been more time online that the last 4 years and it's true that I noted that the forum is not the same... Not as I know...

Although there is no other place were you have a so big knowledge about OC and others topics that here. If I can say, this may be the "Wikipedia" of OC. Xtreme Systems where and will be always, at least to me, a reference for a good hours spend learning and becoming again up to date.

Thank you for everything since I've been a member here, first as a Team Member of a defunct Portuguese OC Team (OC-Zone.org) and now as individual, retired from the OC world but still ready for "some play" when possible. Now is easier that it was yesterday, but the enjoyment is still the same.

To every member in Xtreme Forums and to the Team that keeps this website working, OBRIGADO!!! (Thank you in Portuguese)

[JAWS]

wow very nice thread. Looking back when XS first started I was a kid and now I'm almost 40. It's crazy to think of all the changes in technology in the last 13 years. I'm proud of that fact that XS has been around that long! Not to many sites can say that.

Maybe some will not agree but I also think Hardware prices are to blame with membership in general. Go to Newegg and look at motherboards: $200+, cpu $300+, video cards are $400+, ram, power supply.....and I'm being kind with those prices. Social Media is definitely a factor, but it was hardware costs for me. Don't laugh.... 3 weeks ago my pc was a Q9550 DDR2. I think I made a joke to Dave one time that "I've never used a pc that had DDR3" In the last month I was finally able to buy myself (and by myself I mean for my son) some new hardware that I can be proud of. Buying new hardware gave me a breath of fresh air and I've been on more because of it. Spending that much money on a new pc almost gave me a heart attack. Something I wouldn't have felt back in the day. I guess that comes with age.

anyways I agree with Serra on everything that was said. I for one never agreed with the paid membership, but never spoke my mind because it was not my money paying the bills. I'm glad to see it's opened back up for people to join.

I was thrilled when I read Charles thread about his phase change cooler and bringing it back to life. Also just recently it's nice to see OPP and Icee post again.

People just go through changes/moods and hopefully we can get everybody back together on XS. Just give it time.

[Kingcarcas]

^ Back in the day you could get a $100 CPU + $100 GPU and OC them to get mid-range performance, now forgetaboutit

[Gunslinger]

Zero threads, zero posts and a password required to enter it?

obamasucks is the password.

[Don_Dan]

Wamps is back - thanks Charles!

[Puck]

I was never an active poster here, but was always a lurker back in the day. Think I started lurking around here in 2005??? I didn't do much with PC's for a couple years from ~2010-2012, and when I did I stuck to forums I was more active in, but started a new build last year and was very surprised to see XS as a ghost town. My memories of it were always the center of the most "hardcore" overclockers and fabricators on the internet. XS is not the only site, a lot of PC sites have dwindling user bases, but with the wealth of knowledge here it is sad to see the forums so slow.

I posted a cooling worklog here recently, a pretty unique mod involving ~500 watts of cooling with triple peltiers and some pretty nice hardware, and I think I got one single reply. For something you don't see everyday to barely get a notice was pretty startling...

I am willing to help and check out the forum and post more often, but I agree with the ideas in the OP.

[n00b 0f l337]

Must say, the last week or two have seemed like a real upkick in activity with new posters.
Yay?

[awdrifter]

I used to come to XS more frequently to see all the extreme oc and get help oc'ing my system. But I haven't built a new system for a while, I think it's mainly due to CPU and GPU stagnating. It's not really the fault of XS.