At the risk of oversimplifying things, generally speaking there are three barriers to getting a sims forum of the older fashioned types up and running, and keeping it running. Forgive me if these are all obvious points to the parties at hand.

1 - Getting enough members interested in it. Most such attempts have failed over the years because there were plenty of options including the EA official forums vying for players' attention. This includes both the long-term, what we would call diehard players and the casual ones who would tend to wander in and out sporadically.

2 - Keeping the potential longer term members engaged. This is a no-brainer for sites that have something unique or special to offer already such as Carl's site with its knowledge bases. MTS with its mod and mod support offerings, the Steam forums because of,,,well, Steam, and sites like ours and even MATY back in the day that host popular mods and have one or more developers locked up in a cage in the cellar or attic. But for a newly starting up forum, it can be quite an ongoing struggle to keep everyone who manages to find you and sign up fed, watered, and entertained enough to keep coming back.

3 - Keeping the pests out. This one is huge but unfortunately often under-estimated. By pests I mean both the bored trolls/ill-mannered folks stirring up trouble from their proverbial parents' basement or the equivalent, and the ever-evolving AI powered spam and scam bait accounts. You guys see the occasional spambot account get through our defenses here and make posts until we notice them, but trust me there are constantly thousands or more trying to get in and be disruptive, Staying on top of the defensive mechanisms required to keep the unwanted nonsense out can be quite a daunting task, to put it mildly, and the more popular a site becomes by way of metrics like SEO ranking, the worse it gets.

No one will want to stay engaged with a forum that is constantly overrun with tens of thousands of nonsense spam posts or is constantly offline due to DOS attacks and the like. Even EA has had to grapple with issues like this over the years, with varying results and restrictions applied to user accounts to help keep their forums clean and properly moderated.

Having said all of this, if someone were to start up a CompuServe TS3 Forum, I'd be one of the first to sign up. I think I still remember my user id, it was 72711,35...something. Too bad CS doesn't exist anymore. It wasn't really possible to spam attack a closed ecosystem forum run under a system that charged accounts by the minute for connectivity. Then I guess Yahoo Groups might have been a reasonable successor until it too bit the dust, but for a third party hosted forum system its defenses against threats and spam accounts were shamefully ineffective. Usenet was great in its day, but again had practically no controls even for the supposed "owners" of its news groups.

It will be interesting to see where this project goes, given today's sets of hosting tools and systems in common usage.

A very good post igazor. I have no experience of running a forum but I do think you pointed out all of the important topics there. I really want to give you a better answer but that have to wait until later when I get home again as I'm on phone right now.

Personally I've had some rather bad experiences with forums before that have shaped my view of them in general. Granted, I haven't actually been to a big amount of them before, but the ones I have visited left a bad taste in my mouth -- mainly with them seeming like "gentlemen's clubs" where if you are not part of "the staff" or some pre-established big name with hundreds of posts under your name, you get ignored or outright mocked whenever you dare to speak up. It's really tough for socially awkward people like me to even try to break out of that cycle when you build up the courage to speak up, and then get shut down by some poster with a six-digit post count and a big gaudy signature.

Sorry to see that you had such a bad experience Sazandora123. I had some of the same thing on MTS where some members had set the rule that TS4 was only to seen as a "dumpster fire". No exceptions! Writing that the game is fun were the same thing as waving a giant red flag. That's why I never going to post anything in the TS4 section (or on that forum) in the future...

@igazor: Thanks for your insightful post/warning about the perils of opening and managing a forum. I'm well aware of all the bad guys having a run of the internet. There are ways to mitigate it, but as you explained, all very time consuming.

Sazandora123 post_id=100917 time=1713249841 user_id=22504 wrote: Personally I've had some rather bad experiences with forums before that have shaped my view of them in general. Granted, I haven't actually been to a big amount of them before, but the ones I have visited left a bad taste in my mouth -- mainly with them seeming like "gentlemen's clubs" where if you are not part of "the staff" or some pre-established big name with hundreds of posts under your name, you get ignored or outright mocked whenever you dare to speak up. It's really tough for socially awkward people like me to even try to break out of that cycle when you build up the courage to speak up, and then get shut down by some poster with a six-digit post count and a big gaudy signature.

I'm going to float a theory, one based on having been on the internet forever: I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a small "cabal" of Big Tech insiders who are running the entire show on the web, either as "silent" owners of so many communities or as fake posters registering in huge numbers pretending to be regular posters/"members of the community" but really to spy in on and control discussions to protect an IP/financial stake or sabotage others. This thing you talk about (gentleman's club) I have seen so many times and playing out with such consistency that it started raising red flags over the last 2-3 years.

Those "pre-established big names with hundreds of posts under their name" that you mentioned? I know that they're shill posters who are connected to Big Tech or some other commercial entity in some way. It doesn't make sense that someone who is "just a poster" wracks up so many thousands of posts and seems to live in a forum each and every day.

SimAlot79 wrote: ↑

April 16th, 2024, 3:24 am

Sorry to see that you had such a bad experience Sazandora123. I had some of the same thing on MTS where some members had set the rule that TS4 was only to seen as a "dumpster fire". No exceptions! Writing that the game is fun were the same thing as waving a giant red flag. That's why I never going to post anything in the TS4 section (or on that forum) in the future...

Some people suspect that the most aggressive TS4 bashers both on there and on other platforms are EA employees, either current or formerly employed. I 100% believe that this is the case. Gamers don't have time to rack up thousands of posts or aggressively argue with people on a regular basis about a game and don't care enough to drag things to a personal level.

Also, it's a huge gigantic red flag that corporate espionage and sabotage is taking place on an industry-wide scale when the default response from an aggressive poster is to accuse you of being a shill when you're just a player. I would've never imagined being anyone being a shill (just would assume a fanatic player) but when you hear so many people accuse you and others of being one, this suggests that corporate sabotage and espionage is such a commonplace thing that the ones who do it the most assume that anybody they disagree with it is a spy or shill like them.

If this sounds far-fetched, just know that former employees are not above this type of thing. For instance, there's an anti-Disney channel on YouTube where they pretend to be Disney fans who are outraged by how "woke" it's become. Internet sleuths learned that they were ex-Disney employees and own Disney stock. So, this is not as far-fetched as it seems.

Gee, I'd thought all these years that I posted simply because I liked helping people. I had absolutely no idea that I secretly worked for EA.

Maybe I need to change my sig.

So, now I have a keyboard and can write a longer text...

I once again have to thank igazor for the detailed replay. And I'm very sure that the things stated in the post were based on experience and knowledge. I will try to make a good reply to the post but I'm not sure if I can. But I will try...

As I have stated before I have always been quite shy. But 2009 I did join the MTS forum board. I have bought a copy of TS2 quite recently and now I wanted to know some things about it. So it was not a choice out inf interest, it was a choice out of need so to speak. And when I discovered that the members were friendly and showed interest in the things I wrote and also wanted to help I stayed. Good members are a good foundation of every forum. I have no idea how many The Sims related forums there were at the time but I did not feel any need to search as I have found a good one already... (I were, however, member of a Swedish forum focusing on the game but it was small and did not have much going on).

And that brings us to the second part. The one about keeping members engaged. Now, I might be very easy to entertain. I just love to look at the stuff other players do. The builds, the sims, the funnies and so on. Maybe comment on it, give a like or so. Maybe I can steal...um..."borrow" one idea or two. Or try to, I might not own the needed packs. But I can still take a look. And if there is no new creations to watch I'm sure the game had another glitsh for someone and there is a funny screenshot of it. Yeah, that's mostly how I use forums. But also for asking about stuff and maybe I happen to read something I did not know and can learn a thing or two. Now I'm sure I have been claiming that the forum from Carl & Pam do bot move but it may not be a fair picture... There are surely things moving but I'm not interested in challenges or stories... things that everyone seems to love. And how should I know if the discussions is running wild in the For Rent section when I don't own the pack or even have any intention to add it. Or any of the other packs I don't own and don't plan to add... So that's why I'm so bored with the forum. The members are very nice though...

And so we ended up in the last section. The one about keeping the pests out... Yeah...! As I hinted before, there were things happening over at MTS. I'm not really sure when it began but I 2022 things really went south on the forum... I don't want to talk about it here but let's say that a small group of members decided that TS4 was garbage and that Everyone should share that opinion. And let's also say that the moderators did not spend any time doing something about it... *big sigh* So every forum, no matter what it's main focus is need good fair moderators. It's just as important as it's members and it's topics. Yeah, the internet is full of trolls and other strange people who have failed to grow up and who thinks it's funny to spoil the internet for everyone else... and that is a big task do deal with. And I'm sure it's not easy. Hopefully I did not write anything now that have to be moderated... but if so, I believe that someone did a good job that day.

So yeah, this was some background info on my little journey until now. And some details what I have been searching for. As told, I thought I have found just that in the german forum. But no moderator did want to answer my mails (If they did arrive as intended). Or maybe the problem was on my end, my spampost filter. We don't know that... but it's no idea crying over spoiled milk... or however the saying goes. And the official forum had a lot of the qualities I were searching for but suddenly it was decided that it was to be closed down... and instead of giving me a good reason to why I did get a warning... By EA_Cade!

Now I have to go and rest my back as it hurts a lot. If there will be any replays I will read them tomorrow...

SimAlot79 post_id=100928 time=1713286619 user_id=22292 wrote:german[ forum

I don't know why you should not register. I mean, I am German and sure, you may write there in German language, because not all of are very good in English.
You can use page translation and translate your own writing with Google

You just need to start and meet some people there.
Sure they all know and have nraas mods

Some might be also users here.]

puzzlezaddict post_id=100926 time=1713282483 user_id=17934 wrote: Gee, I'd thought all these years that I posted simply because I liked helping people. I had absolutely no idea that I secretly worked for EA.

Maybe I need to change my sig.

I was talking about people who've spent an inordinate amount of time camping out at forums aggressively derailing people's attempts at discussing their enjoyment of TS3 or TS4, going on daily campaigns trying to convince everyone to ditch one or the other and policing people's opinions about it, to where they're bullying people off platforms. There was a clique of people who did this at the tail end of Sims 3's run at the Sims 3 forum. Now the same thing is happening again as Sims 4 winds down. If you tried saying anything positive when Sims 3 was still active, they bullied you off the site. Today, it's the same thing. You can't say anything positive about TS4 or you get attacked as an EA shill, defender, etc. The aggressors always seem to have an insane number of posts and some kind of pull with mods and admins, like there is some kind of secret society or "gentleman's club," as someone succinctly else put it.

I always found this suspicious, because if a game is at the end of its production cycle (with a sequel on the horizon), why waste so much energy convincing everyone to ditch it or express so much aggressiveness towards people who enjoy it? Maybe the aggressors are crazy or maybe it's something else.