News: Z-Net I's First Weekend Being Public, My Impressions

Monday, May 21, 2012

I chose to release ZNI as a true public beta earlier Friday to give it an ample opportunity to take advantage of the weekend, which has seemed to be zbattles prime time in the past. I've hoped that by the end of the weekend, ZNI's peak user count would have doubled, and previously dead times of day would  have started to see life. While hoping for that, I expected a ton of new users, and planned to see the 2-3 mods the project has stretch their legs and take some of the load off my shoulders. And I hoped to see the community pick up even more then it already had on the forums and IRC chat channel.

I'm sad to say that as this weekend reaches it's completion, I'm extremely disappointed. Rather then all of the aspects I've mentioned growing, they shrunk, or at best stayed exactly the same.

While new users might have seemed to pick up, past users seem to have maybe decreased, netting what I'm certain is at the most maintaining the max population, which is disappointing itself.

Everything else I've mentioned went down

One of my established mods has been MIA for various reasons, the other being on a little, and the new one I finally decided to add based on his frequent activity and helpfulness is no where to be seen as well. So I've been left most of the weekend as the sole mod trying to keep users informed of and following the rules. In the end I had more to shoulder rather than less. Except for Sunday. Things were so dead most of the day, I didn't have to do much.

And both the forum activity and IRC channel activity have just utterly died completely, with mainly just me posting anything or hanging out in the channel.

This is basically why I didn't want to get to invested in this project. I poor tons of my time over the last month into debugging and fixing the program, creating and fine tuning a new website, being as active as possible when moderating the users, finally coming around to the idea that this thing might just do well, start letting myself get my hopes up, and everything dies.

I think I need to take time off from this project soon. It's only the first weekend being truly public, and things could very well still pick up. I'm certainly not ending the project or anything. Outside of proper moderation, this project can sustain itself. But I just can't see myself being active while I wait for things to pick up. It will sap whatever enthusiasm I have left for the project to do so. So I'll be wrestling with that idea for now, and we will see what comes of it.

For now, the program is stable, the website is functional and mostly done, the forums should be sufficient for user needs. I can't shelve moderator duties, so I'll just do my best to handle those while still stepping back some if I indeed need to do so.