The Theory from the Closet podcast has a new interview that people might find interesting:  

Show025: Interview with Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker

No notes to accompany it, and I haven't listened to it yet... so I can't really comment on it.  I know there was some interest in Ron's last interview though, so here you go.

I started listening to it last night and I'm about halfway through. There's a lot of talk about what's necessary to run an effective RPG discussion forum, essentially holding Ron's running of the Forge up as a paragon, which frankly brings to mind plank/mote, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, etc. Though that perspective of mine comes mainly from brief participation, and mainly in the theory fora, a couple years ago.

I got about 20 minutes in...

...I'm not sure I can make it.

Quote from: Elliot WilenI started listening to it last night and I'm about halfway through. There's a lot of talk about what's necessary to run an effective RPG discussion forum, essentially holding Ron's running of the Forge up as a paragon, which frankly brings to mind plank/mote, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, etc. Though that perspective of mine comes mainly from brief participation, and mainly in the theory fora, a couple years ago.

And what exactly is he saying is "necessary"? And is he talking about setup, structure, moderation, what?

RPGPundit

Moderation. He's basically talking about enforcing topic focus and calling people on BS rhetoric & fallacies.

Again, quis custodiet, etc.

I still haven't listened to the rest.

EDIT: He gives a few negative examples (circa-1999 RPGnet), sets the Forge & Vincent's sites as positive examples. Not sure about the old Gaming Outpost: he mentions it, just don't remember what he said. He refuses to categorize Storygames, which is interesting. I wonder if they've outstripped the Forge in traffic.

The best guess we can probably get without admins opening up their logs is probably from //www.trafficestimate.com, which guesses that the Forge got about 35,000 hits in the last month and story-games about 28,000.  (Therpgsite got 62,000, enworld.org got around 258,000, rpg.net got 355,000, wizards.com got 2,834,000.)  This is a super-rough estimate but I would be surprised if the numbers weren't at least in proportion to the correct ones.  In other words, it seems unlikely to me that if trafficestimate.com misses out on counting a particular population of people due to geography, web browser, etc., that that population probably is split more or less along the same proportional lines as the sample it does count.

I don't know that by these numbers I'd call any of the sites more successful than the others, traffic is not the only measure of a successful site in my book. But it was an interesting question so I went and looked.

Any idea what trafficestimate's methodology is?

Anyway, you'd have to listen to the interview to get a clearer idea of what RE means by "effective", or whatever term he uses for the criterion; basically it amounts to something like exchanging/generating useful information, and he distinguishes it from the "emotional" benefit people get from forum participation.

What I was getting at though by "traffic" was more to do with actual posts as opposed to visitors.

In what is probably a fairly flawed method of looking at things, I see about 500 posts on story-games in threads that were updated in the last 24 hours. The same count for the Forge forums is about 160.

As for methodology, it's all a little opaque to me at my limited level of Internet understanding.

Your method is pretty interesting, but of course on the Forge people aren't fucking around and yacking about nothing and on story-games people often are, and that's by design in both cases...

I heard the whole thing and it was rather... pathetic.

It's extremely weird but the interviewer was blatantly awestruck. I mean, like the stereotypical amateur journalist interviewing his favorite rock music idol. It was scary that way.

But even worse than that and much more alarming, Edwards was basically controlling the interview, especially during the second half. "yeah, let's talk about that" "no we don't have much time".

Everybody that knows me will know I have absolutely nothing against the indie mouvement or anything. But this needs to be said if the interviewer is somehow made aware of this thread:

You are the worse interviewer I ever came across. Seriously. There needs to be a minimum of objectivity. Even if sympathetic to someone or his cause, there are ways to challenge so that things will get interesting.

I can also do a complete transcript of the interview, for those who can't bother with the audio:

Fanboy: Ron, you are amazing!

Edwards: Indeed, I am.

Fanboy: How amazing are you?

Edwards: Very amazing.

Fanboy: Can you describe this amazingness?

Edwards: Get over it, pity mortal. Ask me how good of a moderator I am, instead.

Fanboy: Ron, how good of a moderator are you?

Edwards: I would say I am the best out there.

Fanboy: At night, I touch myself thinking about you.

Edwards: Thanks. I think I made my case here. I'm locking this interview and bolting out of here!

Quote from: JDCorleyThe best guess we can probably get without admins opening up their logs is probably from //www.trafficestimate.com, which guesses that the Forge got about 35,000 hits in the last month and story-games about 28,000.  (Therpgsite got 62,000, enworld.org got around 258,000, rpg.net got 355,000, wizards.com got 2,834,000.)  This is a super-rough estimate but I would be surprised if the numbers weren't at least in proportion to the correct ones.  In other words, it seems unlikely to me that if trafficestimate.com misses out on counting a particular population of people due to geography, web browser, etc., that that population probably is split more or less along the same proportional lines as the sample it does count.

I don't know that by these numbers I'd call any of the sites more successful than the others, traffic is not the only measure of a successful site in my book. But it was an interesting question so I went and looked.

Wicked cool site.  Did //www.dragonsfoot.org and got 48,600.  Wizards is fairly cranking the Boston Globe got about 2,900,000; alas the NY Times came in at over 10,000,000 in the last month.

BBC.co.uk got 32,931,000 visits last month.

Quote from: JDCorleyThe best guess we can probably get without admins opening up their logs is probably from //www.trafficestimate.com, which guesses that the Forge got about 35,000 hits in the last month and story-games about 28,000.

My blog is estimated at about 90,000... so those are pretty small numbers imho.

I think trafficestimate aggregates all subdomain visits together, for example, it gives the same number of hits for forums.rpg.net and //www.rpg.net - check to see if your blog estimate is actually the estimate for the whole blog domain.

I have my own domain, with no sub-domains:  http://www.designmeme.com/

Cool! That would do it then.