I'm gonna list a bunch of suggestions since everyone pretty much nailed the possible reasons.


1... Social Media.

Social Media has and always been a key, but it's rarely been used for Vizzed. Having a Twitter account that focuses on Vizzed would do so much for the site. I rarely check the FB page but when I would, all I would see were announcements and updates. Those aren't going to interest new people, or even most old users.

I already talked to David once about this and here are things that could be tweeted about on a daily bases that would probably interest not just users but Twitter users in general.

A. Tweets about new threads. If a quality/interesting/funny thread is made, tweet it, along with hashtags and whatever.

B. Reviews, guides, and Youtube videos.

C. Quotes from within threads and posts made that day, whether funny, inspirational, random, etc.

D. Competition results and reminders.

E. Congratulations to promoted users

F. User and Site-wide milestones. (20K posts, 1 million words, 3 billion views, etc)



Back in the good old days when I was writing a lot of reviews, I would instantly tweet the review and that tweet would alone bring in 50-100 extra views within 10 minutes. Did the same with regular threads on steam updates and more.




2... Change TDV frequency

After more than a dozen occurrences, I would say that the TDV takes place too often now. If anyone has ever noticed, I've only fully competed once per calender year. April 2014, April 2015, July 2016, and January 2017. Once one of those were done, a new one begins just 2 months later and I was like ****, just not physically ready to go again.

Not to mention that with a ton more overall winners now, and it taking place so often, the value of the competition simply drops over time.

I think the TDV should be cut to twice a year or just one overall event. If we do it just once a year, we could bring back the post and CP VCS as micro-competitions throughout the year and then the TDV would be the main event.




3... Limit guides and reviews

Having long reviews and guides is great for a number of reasons, but when it comes to what they do strictly for the site, they can hurt a lot. Users will be less likely to read through them fully or even read them at all and by making really long reviews, that can take away from writing other reviews.

There's many that would equate to about 4 to 8 pages worth of writing, though many places that have gaming articles and reviews aren't usually more than like 2 pages unless they are infrequent features.

Writing a 4000 word review has it's benefits but if a user writes 4 1000 word reviews instead, that's obviously more reviews, as well as more of a possibility of users actually reading each one, as well as possibly replying.

Maybe hire a couple staff members whos quota would be to write more reviews/guides, that are smaller.




4... Scrap Youtube

Completely scrap everything that has to do with the videos and start over. Not only has there been so many problems with videos in the past, but starting over with focused energy could make videos better.

A. Videos on game pages should be seperste from videos on the YouTube channel. Have two channels. One that's private, this will store all the long and possibly boring walkthroughs, soundtrack videos, repeats, etc. With it private, they can only be accesses from game pages. Then a regular public channel that has things like uploaded streams, more in-depth and entertaining Let's Plays, commentary, etc.

B. If videos are manually reviewed before they go up, that would be a huge boost. It would take time and probably cause fewer videos, but a very quick skim could eliminate bad quality or spam videos, determine which channel they belong in, and serve as a way to find the best for possibly more promotion.

C. Users should be limited to the number of minutes of footage that they upload per day, instead of the number of videos. This can help cut back on users recording a bunch of super long videos and posting them all at once (which could be a way to cheat) and could allow for shorter videos that users might be more willing to fully watch.




5... Make Steam more prominent

Someone mentioned a lack of a niche and too much of a focus on old school games. An entire Steam/PC gaming area would help a lot in many ways.

When I had my Steam forum, there have been many times when it was incredibly successful, many times actually being one of the 3 most viewed forums for a day. Here are things I've done with the Steam forum that helped a lot and could really help the site.


A. There have been so many haters of FNAF and Undertale. I myself never played Undertale and only played FNAF for the first time a few months ago. Still, I took advantage of the trends and was able to get Huge activity out of both. There have been times where we had 3 FNAF threads being made a week thay were actively being reliped to. These were single games that at times had more engagement than all of Pokemon or other entire genres.

It wasn't just those two. Single games like CSGO, Smite, Overwatch, and Rocket League has their own active communities, and many games still do and can be capitalized on.


B. Talking about indie games was always the best. I would search Kickstarter and Green light for hot games and make a thread for them. Not just that, but also tweet about the threads as well. An indie game developer isn't a worker for Rockstar or Blizzard, if they find out that someones talking about their small game, they get happy.

There are now developers who have full release games on Steam that have signed up for vizzed, used threads, reviews, and quotes in their green light campaigns/store pages. Heck I can easily list at least 3 reviews I've done where developers gave me a key to their games, soley for the purpose of writing a review on Vizzed. Talking about these upcoming and new indie games is a great way to get support from all sorts of new developers and fans, and get a grasp on new niches before they even start.

C. Many of our competitions failed because there still wasn't enough real promotion, but competitions were always a big deal in the Steam forum and can be in the future. Steam games open up a whole new window for competitive gaming, as well as achievement hunting, screenshot/video competitions, and more.

D. Markets and workshops were always a big thing. Markets in steam were always successful. Almost every game has thousands of in game items and giving gamers a place to find what items they want and trade for, whether skins, cards, or whatever was always cool.



There's so much we can do with a dedicated Steam environment when it comes to keeping users entertained and getting new ones, and that's not even including regular game threads and news articles.

Davideo7 :

zanderlex : I disagree with you regarding long guides. Guides are meant to help the player, and writers always try to find solutions to make the navigation within the guide easier to help the reader if it's too long.

The real problem with guides maybe is the format Vizzed uses, in which the guide is displayed as a single paged document. Other sites, like Gamefaqs, have adapted a system that automatically splits a guide in pages upon reaching a certain size, with the addition of an automated table of contents that immediately links to the page containing whichever section you click.

I'm not saying we copy that system, but maybe we could introduce those tables of content with links to sections. I've seen people using them and having a tutorial for it in the Guides forum could greatly help other users who don't know how to do it. That way, a reader wouldn't need to scroll down infinitely until they find the section they want, greatly increasing the guide's efficiency no matter how long it is.

I totally agree with social media, the FB page barely shows anything beyond announcing the month's competitions. Maybe hiring staff with the role of community manager, just like we have chat manager and youtube manager, could make things easier, but then again, great power comes with great responsibility and it could go very wrong if not handled well.

About TdV frequency, I don't see what can we lose in trying. Maybe we could keep just the Summer one, since it's the most active one for school break, and revive the VCS during the rest of the year at a frequency we can discuss. It doesn't even need to be the VCS, we could also think of other competitions that don't necessarily need to last a full month. There are already a few suggestions by some users, though nothing it's decided yet, but probably if we didn't have the TdV happening so often other competitions could arise more easily.

I want to first say this has had my attention even when I was inactive. But it really broke my heart to hear those statistics. Now I know exactly why I needed to come back. I'm feeling quite a mixture of emotions about this, especially guilt, so I hope my post isn't all over the place.

I think there are so many reasons for this drop, but I think the main one is Nintendo removing all their games from the site. Almost all the games I played on the site were Nintendo games, and I've barely played any games here lately.

One condition with me was that despite the solution for black screens with no audio on games coming out, the solution never worked for me so another large amount of games I used to play here are gone for me.

Another thing I've noticed, including with myself until last month, is that many of the users who brought this site activity have either moved on or they don't visit the site near as often due to real life growing busier. The latter is what I did. For almost the entire school year. School drained me of my energy, which made me not have interest in posting.

The lack of activity might have been a cycle. What I think happened was that a wave of users stopped posting, and then other users saw the inactivity and lost interest in posting too. There haven't been near as many new threads. Threads are what drive the activity in the forums.

My idea to raise activity is to invent more competitions that involve the forums, especially with new threads. We could have contests taking place in individual forums, which would help overall activity. It'd help because many users participating in contests in the forums they like, and this taking place in multiple forums, would add up quickly! As for awards, I don't have ideas for that but awards are a huge incentive. For certain forums, possibly a thread award for "most thought-provoking discussion" would make quality post activity rise.

Especially now that it's summer, if there's any way I can help, let me know. I've already mentioned in another thread that I'll do some post sprees once or twice a week and create threads to contribute. I was hoping it would become a trend with other users returning for the summer too.

mastergame : What do you mean do stuff to get access? We've already been doing it before and it only stopped because I chose to stop it, and we've never sold Steam games before.


EX Palen : Even a better table of contents would still be very helpful when it comes to guides. If we could get different tabs or whatever, that would be much better to look at than one massive document.

As for the TDV, when it comes to posting, Ive always seen Winter as the biggest one for somw reason. I always look at the daily stats and the first week of January usually has some of the biggest days of the whole year.


In most sports, you don't have one championship, like in Golf and Tennis you have the different cups or whatever and the overall championships, I was always thinking something like thay would be great.

m0ssb3rg935 : I saw you using links inside a guide of yours some two years ago. Mind giving your input about what me and zander are talking about a thread detailing a tutorial so everyone can use them?

I'm in the middle of finals, but by the third week of June I might be able to go through my project list and see if I could test it out. I know I'm not part of the Game Guide Writers as an official member anymore, but we need as many people involved as we can. I can't guarantee anything, but I'll at least give it a try.

zanderlex : Winter has its early weeks active because some schools haven't yet started after Christmas break. However, summer break lasts for the whole Summer TdV, so technically it's active all month and not just at the start. It's what I've always heard and logic also supports it, but you know far more about the TdV than me so I'll leave it here.

One thing about the several championships in sports: the full calendar may sometimes be a drag. If we have several competitions, we should make sure there's enough resting time for people who might have had to sacrifice time in order to participate, so for starters let's not make a ton of competitions until we know for sure the userbase can actually take it. Changing up to three TdV for VCS might be a good start, and would also give a lot of room for more competitions to join the calendar in the future should things pick up again.

zanderlex : Literally everything you've suggested makes perfect sense. I'd prefer if there was a way to migrate videos from the YouTube channels to their respective new channels than just deleting everything, though. I don't have any experience with uploading to YouTube. Is that a possibility?

I also don't entirely agree with limiting the size of reviews and guides, but you're right about longer documents being completely overlooked because of overwhelming word count. Mandating a good table of contents for guides like Ex Palen said, as well as a brief summary or "TL;DR" for reviews seems like an excellent solution.


EX Palen : I made that when I was toying around with learning HTML and I've long since forgotten how I did that lol. However, if it's still supported by the new site code, I could most certainly relearn it and make a guide for it.


mastergame : We're not really bringing Steam any new business, what we would be doing in these suggestions would be capitalizing on Steams popularity. We'd be a community hub for the people arleady playing those games. Nothing lost, only things gained. It would be coexistence, not competition with Valve. And regarding the RGRs declining popularity, it already have it's own particular crowd and it's own market. PC gaming and retro emulation are two completely different animals and we need to be less dependent of the RGR anyway.

I haven't been active much solely because my computer screen is messed up and it really bothers me. I just now reasoned with myself to deal with the issues until I get it fixed, so I'll be making a lot more posts, and hopefully that may help with the activity issues somehow, in some form.

m0ssb3rg935 :
EX Palen :

Here's a random idea. With the current CP system it would drastically drop payout but could work as a table of contents.

What if users who make threads often has their own thread where they add posts to that thread that are the parts of a guide.

When a user wants to make a guide, they make one short post in the guide forum with the table of contents. Each link links to the individual post in that "master thread"

Would be pointless for one guide but for users who make a bunch, they could fit the contents of 10+ guides into one thread and individually link each post to their correct Table of Contents.

These master threads could even have their own forum that pay the same CP/Viz as guides within that forum.

It's some work but could allow guides to be cleaner and easier access to each part.

Many users who used to be incredibly active haven't really seen the draw, or had the time anymore to be super active. Things that are completely out of your control have led to the decline of activity, primarily the Nintendo games and the Chat room not working.

New users haven't been coming, and very few are making an effort to post at all. That is a serious problem, and without older users getting their attention, it's just hard for them to start posting. 

Many people have offered great suggestions to this issue, and I like all of them. Having a bigger presence everywhere in a community helps a ton with getting new users and already having them know how much the community means to everyone and how great vizzed really is. 

Without a constant flow of new users or old users staying around and being active, this is what happens. 

So many people use social media, and getting noticed could be huge and zanderlex said. Having active accounts, not having to be run by David, would help gain publicity from all over the world. Instagram is big due to the explore and other sections that help get random accounts noticed by many people. 

You can only do so much to get Vizzed known and continue to have activity, most of it is out of your hands.

Also, there are hardly any staff, which due to the low posts we don't need more staff, but more staff would also increase posts, so who knows. 

zanderlex : That very idea actually crossed my mind as I was typing up my last reply, but I didn't mention it because I thought it sounded slightly excessive. I could definitely see having a guide directory for specific users that make a whole lot of them. If I recall correctly, my sister has all of her guides linked in her bio on her profile.

m0ssb3rg935 : Someone should test that out at some point.

Heck, someone could literally make a thread that links all the posts of this thread to test out if it's quick and smooth and if a Table of Contents could actually look appealing.

I heavily agree with some of the suggestions in this thread. Social Media would be a great way to promote the site/community. Creating a position such as the Twitter Manager or something like that is a great idea. You'll have less to worry about on your plate, and you can trust that whoever has that position will do their best to spread the word about this site on their specific social media platform.

I know what's wrong!

My ask anything thread has been closed for a while. If we would just bring that back then things would be alright again....



Also, it sounds like people have some really good ideas on how to improve things. I was never great with the ideas so it is nice to see people coming up with some.

m0ssb3rg935 : It shouldn't be hard to relearn, and we have a lot to gain from it like you and zander have exposed. Since your guide displays well within the new site code, I'd say it's still possible, so it could be worth giving it a try.

zanderlex : Honestly, I prefer the table of contents at the start of a guide instead of having to surf through different threads. Keep in mind that guides display at the game's page in the RGR and/or VGR, so if people access the guide directly from the game's page they expect to read something and not just a bunch of links.

Why would social media users bother posting here when they can just post their thoughts on Vizzed's social media page instead? You're going to need some compelling content to turn those into conversions.

It is really hard to nail down reasons why the site's activity dropped. We lost a lot of games, people are absorbed in school and college, some people work too much and no longer have free time...

I don't know what exactly the reason is. I hate to see the site going this way though. :T

A user of this : There's also that worse-case scenario where users completely forget about this site. Even if they have free time, they don't come here because they're now spending a large amount of time on other sites, especially social media.