You know, it wouldn’t bother me in the least to see more ads on QT3 forums. A banner at the top, one on the bottom and one on each side would be just fine. In this day and age of high res monitors there’s a ridiculous amount of free space. So long as there’s no animation and no auto-sound I’d be just fine with that.
How the hell did it take me three days to see this?
This is the only online community I belong to, you you’ve become the first Patreon project I back :P
Pledged, Tom. These forums and the Qt3 frontpage are the places I visit most frequently and the game and movie podcasts are the podcasts I listen to before any others. I didn’t even realize Qt3 was being adblocked but i’ve now whitelisted the page.
Tom, I don’t think that anyone has “left” Qt3 for Slack. We all still post here in various ways. The only thread that has wilted, I think, is the League of Leaguelets thread, because it handled small game tournaments that have largely dried up anyhow. A couple of these tiny tournies are still puttering along thanks to Slack.
I don’t mean to sound defensive. I just want you to be as cheerful as possible! :)
I will donate, and will post a link on Slack to remind people about this donation effort.
:green_heart: qt3 & tom chick
:smiling_tearful_happy_love_face:
p.s. I wonder if the forum could become a little more Slack-like somehow, like being able to post @tom_chick and such to notify people directly when they are being mentioned. Maybe by 2017!
Sorry I can’t donate to the Patreon at the moment, I’m pretty sympathetic to the plight of trying to make a living as a creative being in that boat myself these days. Hopefully things will pick up for me soon on the art front and I will have a bit of extra and will be able to help out more.
In the mean time I did turn off my ad blocker for QT3 a couple years ago when I found out that running it hurt your revenue. Hope that helps in some small way. :)
Oh no, no, I didn’t mean to imply the actual folks who posted left! I just meant that you guys are using Slack to coordinate games now instead of the forums. I figured you were doing that because you were worried about the threads bugging people or something, which as far as I know wasn’t the case at all. And I also know that Slack is convenient in terms of instantly contacting each other with “hey, it’s your turn messages” and stuff, as per the feature you mentioned.
Which is exactly the sort of thing we should talk about in terms of considering whether or how well vBulletin suits our purposes! I know you can set vBulletin to ping you with an email if you get a PM, but it sounds like you guys are looking for something more along the lines of something you keep open to page each other? And that’s totally cool, by the way. It’s not like I feel betrayed by Slack or anything. Frankly, I just don’t really know what it is other than hearing some folks talk about it in the context of Qt3 games. I know about as much about Slack as I know about Grinder, Snapchap, LinkedIn, and Geocities. I think I’m finally getting a handle on the Twitter thing, however.
-Tom
Tom,
Do you have a bit of history on how QT3 started as I cannot recall how I found it back in the day? I think it was a link on octopus overlords or something.
I would find it interesting if you could entertain my question with a couple of paragraphs.
To clarify, I know why it was created but not when or who with and what you were doing previously.
Alex
I think I was the same: Octopus Overlords -> Fidgit -> QT3. Can’t rememebr how i found my way to OO though and I was never active there.
Oh gosh, I was one of those dopey youngsters when I joined too. I think a freshman in college. Anyway, luckily for me, and the rest of you, I didn’t really start posting until a year or two ago. Still, qt3 is my favorite site and now with the branching out to youtube (and Slack) I’ve been getting so much out of this place that I’m happy to kick in a couple of bucks. Hopefully I’ll be able to contribute more in the near future.
Slack is mainly being used for game organization, to be sure, although there is a substantial amount of “your mom’s face” joking, and a side conversation about programming. Occasionally, someone posts a photo of what they just cooked or baked.
Some of the history is right on the Patreon site or the video.
As I remember it, back in mid to late 1990s, there were various newsgroups going strong on Usenet in Strategy, RPGs, Simulation games, space games, adventure games, etc. In those topics, you’d see some overlapping people posting. I was there. Tom and Mark Asher were both pretty prominent. There were a bunch of folks at Gone Gold (like its founder Rich LaPorte, but also a lot of the forum community there) who were also frequent posters in the newsgroups. And, as Tom notes at Patreon, it was this setting where he and Mark founded the site here in 1999 under the CNet sponsorship umbrella, which promptly when belly up when Qt3 was founded.
The site originally consisted of a front page with reviews and features and links to Tom and Mark’s work elsewhere. As Tom notes in the text at Patreon, Mark left fairly early on, seeing the writing on the wall with that whole internet bubble burst.
The original forum software (the Blue Boards, as they were called) was pretty terrible. It was threaded without major category breaks, and new posts didn’t bump active topics to page one. You had to go searching for them. I think it was at least a year or two before Qt3 went to forums that we’d all recognize. I think when you see really, really old posts here with “Anonymous User” tags and stuff, those are posts that were archived from the old boards. As I recall, initially Qt3 didn’t even have a forum at launch. The original idea was to post and link new content here and then discuss on the CSIPGs groups.
When folks originally began posting here, there were a few people who posted at Gone Gold and Qt3 both, but it also seemed like it forked the old Usenet/newsgroup folks. I had a couple of posts on the Blue Boards, but waited a year or so before registering here–I think it was during one of the first extended GG outages, when it started to become clear that folks like Bill Harris and Andrew kind of didn’t have a lot of incentive or support for staying at GG or keeping it up and running.
I think it was also the rise of MMOs that drew those two communities together as well. Both DAoC and WoW especially.
Thanks triggercut, I remember being on gone gold back in the day as well. Seems like a lifetime ago now.
Think I came here from the old Avault site, first the newsgroup then the forums, then here.
The photo of Tom at his Patreon site – it’s mainly his eyes, with his head tilted slightly, like a puppy – is not even close to fair. How are we supposed to make a reasoned decision about contributing?
That’s remarkable- very cool.
Yeah, maybe it was AVAULT where I stumbled over here. I never can remember. I’d never posted on a forum. It was too weird and I figured no one would care what I had to say. I was very intimidated. I got over that. I posted in almost every thread for a while. I mean, people still didn’t care what I wanted to say, but I didn’t care that they didn’t care. :) I have a lot of good friends in RL and virtually because of this site directly because of Tom and his appearance on 90210.
West with the Night! Yay!
Anyone remember the year Qt3 forums actually started? Was it 2002? 2003? I recall being in college and being a lurker for a few years afterwards after Brad Wardell mentioned Qt3 when I was active on the Stardock forums or maybe it was in the Stardock IRC. Anyways I remember in 2007 I sent a request to become a member, because new members needed approval or something and it took Tom , 2 years to approve it. :p
I honestly don’t. Tom would probably know, or Mark.
The switch to a regular forum happened in mid to late 2002 or so, because those are the earliest posts that come up with a forum search.
But, before that the Blue Boards were here, and they may have been part of Qt3 from the very beginning of the site. Not sure.