Hello everyone,

I'm here on behalf of the Administration team to let you guys know of something that's been happening for the past months: a decline in activity. Not just from the Staff, not just from the community, not just from the Admins, from everyone involved. This, we believe, is not a good sign at all. As posts started to decline, we felt less and less interested in pouring hours into the development of this site, this community and these projects. It's a very tough and sometimes bitter job, but we've nevertheless signed up for it and so we kept hacking at it. We understand that the very nature of this site means quite a bit of lurking is bound to happen, but on the same token, it still makes us feel less interested and makes the site less involving.

However, we just can't pull through it anymore. We have other projects, other obligations and priorities. This site has been our largest project to date, but it currently is falling into dust. We hope you can understand the pressure and amount of work we've got on our shoulders, and how we unfortunately do not find the motivation to continue around here anymore. We thought we should let you know in advance so that we may still be able to do something about it.

We need new staff. Not necessarily the admins of the biggest mods in the world; quite the opposite actually. We need people who have two rare and valuable commodities: time and motivation. Without those two, this site is ultimately doomed to fail. I know this might sound overly pessimistic and discouraging, but we think honesty is a prime value and as such we are expressing our thoughts unshielded.

If you think you have what it takes and you can pour the hours needed to stop the ship from sinking, be sure to contact us. You don't need to be a jack of all trades; as long as you think you can contribute to the site, go ahead and explain us what you think you can do. We'll be more than happy to welcome dedicated and motivated people around here. You see, we need a lot of content done, and we either don't have the time or don't have the knowledge to do this. We hope YOU can do it.

I'll state this again: this site is on the brink of extinction; this is not something we like to say at all, but it's becoming too hard to continue. Please help us help you, and a BIG thanks to all of those who keep this site active by posting and sharing your wealth of knowledge and information.

Thanks,
FriendlyFire and the Starport Administration

May be there is a bit low activity atm - But is this from the beginning of the project? No, there was even less activity there.
I personally think that "we" should finish the migration of the home page and may be even of the forums/downloads area, I will talk to some people then to re-upload some things (and picking them out of the DL archive of course >_> ^^) and I think the wiki should get online too...may be even if unfinished, because then it will be easier to convince players to come over here and to fill out articles of the wiki.
Unfortunaly I don't have the knowledge of those server & web site things (PHP, CMS...) :/

So you would rather have pulled the plug than find more motivated people ???

Seems like the easy option to me. Also a bad choice to with recent events involving another comunity site i dont think the community would handle yet another blow.

Granted the players are dropping, ive seen the numbers on MU go from 40 at peak times down to between 0 and 5. But that doesnt mean im going to pull the plug. While there are still players MU will continue.

We are only trying to be honest here.

What i wrote was basicly the same i wrote yesterday in the admin sections.
Its just the feeling i have.

The modding is one part and that's covered very well imho.

The other and much bigger part is the players
looking for mods and gaming advice.
And I think i offered my 2 cent about that more than one time.

Here some old and some additional cents:
---- create 2 clear sections, one for players, one for modders
and try more to adress players,
what will also keep the modders and server admins interested,
- even those who are not willing to share anything but self praise.
---- who ever want's to do PR 4 Freelancer / The-Starport go ahead , go go go
and don't wait for a sensefull discussion or help.
I tied and noticed: your on your own. (4 example here)
And still i keep trying - but i won't discuss that anymore.


@BAS:
the last one is also my answer 4 your topic
Good job - go ahead. Decide on your own.

What you must understand is that we, too, are human beings. We are dedicated to other projects, we have lives that already take up quite large chunks of our time and we still try to find some space to work on Starport, more often than not at the expense of our own personal projects.

We can't do it all by ourselves; without any support, The Starport is nothing but a shell. Not only do we need an active community, we also need people to help manage it. We don't want to hurt the community, of course; however, please don't assume we will be taking all the flak and doing all the work, as we don't have the time nor the motivation (at that point) to do that. If nobody's willing to stand up and do something about it, chances are we'll slowly fall into nothingness.

You can't do all by yourselfs ... of course, I guess nobody is going to disagree at this one. I see only one problem: You said several times that you need help ... but what kind of help? Maybe it's just me, but I don't see any specific request of help.
Tell us what you want us to do and we'll see what we can do to keep this side and it's community allive!

I like the way SP looks now. I find it easy enough to navigate and all that. I think that there is no simple fix to get more players and thus activity here, but here are some random thoughts:

- What I'd like to see is SP become one of the key respostories of FL information (isn't it all ready?).
- Maybe digging through the archive and reposting (and updating) some of the posts - the mod errors and tutorial ones in particular.
- Ask authors of information at other sites if their material could be reposted here
- Ask people to create tutorials and guides specifically for this site. I guess I'm sort of promising to try and do something with FL hook along these lines.
- A project to create a comprehensive modding guide for FL. A lot of information already exists but is scattered from tens of posts and sites. This could be a special section run by the admins where information from other posts in the forum is tidied up and re-listed in a consistent format. We don't really need a flashy wiki.

Oh and since I haven't already said this: Worfeh and the rest of the Administration team - thanks for the effort you've put in to create and maintain this site.

PS. If the key issue is to get the post count up, I guess I could create a flame thread. I've a number of topics that would work. Let me know if you need me to do this.