What can we do to spread the word about OSF?

Rogerbee wrote:
We are now on Google people! 5th result down when you type 'onesixthfigures'. Not bad, that at least means that outsiders can find us without us needing to find them.

Happy days!

CHEERS!

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I submitted the site to Bing as well.

Cool, it's not up there yet, I just looked. Might want to go to Yahoo as well.

CHEERS!

I’ve been noticing the site on Google, as well. Very good news.

Thanks for helping out spreading the word. I knew enough to submit it to Google, but stupidly didn't realize/remember we should have done the same with the others.

Bing and Yahoo are the main ones aside from Google.

CHEERS!

Any further/new ideas and suggestions fellow members?

Nothing readily springs to mind now, I think, for the most part, we've all done as much as we can. Our membership seems to grow by the day and those that do come will soon spread the word to others. Provided we get the search hits as well as word of mouth we should do alright now.

CHEERS!

Yeah, I just hope we don't end up losing members because of the photo-posting issue. It'd be a bummer if TankGirlFuzzy disappears out of aggravation.

So far they are the only one to report it. I don't know of anyone else that is using PB, so I don't know how we could replicate the issue to see what happens. After their last debacle most people I know of stopped using them.

CHEERS

hadn't thought about this...i will post on fb.

It's interesting that there will be a local show here June 16 where I expect to see several strong members of OSW, some showing their work. None of that group have come across, so hopefully it won't be awkward or a subject to avoid but hopefully the opposite.

I assume some of the people who are strong components of OSW, especially those at the Mod level, have some special sensitivity about coming over here, or having one foot in both camps. Their devotion to keep OSW afloat is probably testing them beyond previous limits with the new OSW owners and the tech issues, so their feelings about OSF could be rightfully ambivalent. I know Gubernator has said quite rightly that they know they're welcome here if they want to come etc. but I wonder if there's anything more that could be done to address the special cases of eg the OSW mods, great guys all. Maybe there could be a way to reassure them that if they chose to post here under a new name/alias no one would rat them out? Don't know if that makes any sense.

Moonbase Alpha Male -- Without wishing to get into too much discussion of another forum on this venue, I wonder if we are just imagining any such feelings on the part of members still exclusively in OSW; this might be something like a "guilty conscience" at play. There could be all sorts of reasons, including familiarity, routine, the unwillingness to remember yet another password, etc. At least one OSW mod has joined us (although I don't think he has posted), while another's feelings for OSW's new management have been made clear, and may be "over" forums altogether. As for said management, I suppose they might be unhappy with any venue potentially distracting from their own traffic; that said, there is no business component to ours so we are not that sort of competition for them, and we are not set up to be their rival. Many of our members are members of both forums; those that have abandoned the old forum have done so either because they are fed up with its issues and policies or because they are actually unable to log in or operate there. And that was none of our doing.
I, too, would like to see our membership grow. Visibility on the old forum does not mean we are trying to "poach" its members, nor are we trying to recruit every person in sight. But they are welcome to join us, as long as all keep working toward participation in this cooperative community of persons interested in sixth scale figures and exchanging ideas with like-minded individuals.

We can all get along.

That's my take.

I believe some older veterans there are not inclined to join us because we're not their cup of tea in terms of size, diversification, niche, robustness, etc.

That's fine.

This group never claimed to be anything other than what it is and we're open to all themes, topics, genres of 1:6 as reasonably as can be expected.

MAM, if you want to spread the word about OSF during the meet . . . then please do so.  OSF is not out to replace any other group.  Our group have no agenda asides from being another place for 1:6 hobbyists to visit and participate in.  We have no business sponsorship or any kind of revenue model/plan.

So that's that.

This thread was important to get some background info. Thanks.
What is the state of OSW right now? I'm only there a few times a year.

I'm glad message boards still exists with everyone and their mother migrating to social media. I'm at facebook too for 1/6 stuff, but it soo different to a good board. User experience, tutorials everything is better here imo

Valiarde wrote:This thread was important to get some background info. Thanks.
What is the state of OSW right now? I'm only there a few times a year.

I'm glad message boards still exists with everyone and their mother migrating to social media. I'm at facebook too for 1/6 stuff, but it soo different to a good board. User experience, tutorials everything is better here imo

I still check in at OSW occasionally, but it’s definitely lost the largest portion of it’s contributing members. Periodically, I still find login issues there, and the image posting is still an issue for me — so aside from trying to comment and help out the newer members there, I haven’t posted images in a long time at that site. A vast majority of members from that site have gone to Facebook, and many have come here. I won’t do FB myself; this is as close to “social media” as I’ll ever get. I’ve seen members who migrated here in the beginning, but stopped coming, now back on the Old Site (as many of us like to all it). With the Photobucket debacle, the lack of a decent search function, and the loss of the most of its members, that place is still dying a slow death as far as I can see.

And I agree with you, message boards like this one are infinitely more user friendly, and just friendly and helpful, than social media. We’ve had our ups and downs, of course, but I think it’s been mostly working out for the benefit of all who choose to participate.

I'm with you on being thankful for the existence of this messageboard, Valiarde -- all my best and formative experiences on the internet were with discussion forums and the like back in the day, and it's still my preferred way of discussing niche interests with other like-minded people online. Social media has its uses, but it's too 'of the moment' and discussion tends to be shortlived and not easily accessible in archived form afterward, and thus a great deal of shared information ends up lost in the ether. 

As for my own social media usage, I'm on Facebook because I live halfway across the world from most of most family and relatives, so it is a convenient way of keeping in immediate touch. I've only recently starting checking out the 1/6 side of it, but like a lot of social media it seems a bit too focused on individual personalities and their work, and their respective 'followers' or hangers-on fawning over them. I mean, nothing against people getting acknowledgement for their skills in this hobby, but it's a completely different vibe from this site. I like the the fact that we are all 'equals' here, you know? 

I don't spend too much time on Facebook for 1/6 though, especially since at this time of year there are wayy too many spoilers for certain upcoming media that are almost impossible to avoid. My only real purpose for being even remotely involved in 1/6 stuff on FB at all is simply to make sure I'm aware of the various artists and creators out there for networking purposes. 

As for instagram.... I realize a lot of 1/6 collectors and hobbyists use it to share their photos, but I just don't 'do' that site at all. I can't really explain why I dislike it as intensely as I do, but I just won't set foot there. And same for twitter. Just... no.  The only other social media site I am active on is tumblr, since I'm heavily into fandom. I occasionally post pics of my figure collection on my tumblr blog as it's fandom-related, but it's not really the main focus of what I do there. 

Anyhoo, happy you are here, Valiarde. And it's indeed good to remind ourselves of the history of this site. I'm so glad that even in the age of social media dominance, it's still here! Thank you to everyone who helped established it. 

I'm not sure whether there is an option here to show all the stuff, artwork I mean, on google? I remember that if I started a thread on OSW with the title "Ogre" or something, I would see pictures of my Ogre by simply typing in Ogre in google with a link to the forum. Could be not bad for OSF ?

I’ve done Google searches and our site has shown up. It’s not the first site to come up, but it does come up.

Our site is both accessible and searchable by Google, and in fact I can see the Google bot (or two) looking at it from time to time. It might not always be the first thing on the list, but both the site and images uploaded here do show up in Google searches. They would show up earlier or first, if they get more hits/looks.

GubernatorFan wrote:Our site is both accessible and searchable by Google, and in fact I can see the Google bot (or two) looking at it from time to time. It might not always be the first thing on the list, but both the site and images uploaded here do show up in Google searches. They would show up earlier or first, if they get more hits/looks.

It may not be the first to show up on the main search, but in many cases it does show up prominently on the image search -- I often search for 1/6 related stuff on google, only to find that the best visual examples are from this site. In fact, I've sometimes been looking for something very specific and have found my own posts.   Though more often that not it's one of GF's reviews.  

I greatly appreciate the fact that this forum is essentially an archive of creativity and resources for creativity. While of course it would be nice to get more traffic at times, I much prefer it being the open and helpful place for sharing our niche collections/creations that it is, to being a more 'popular' site that was solely about 'showing off' or 'I have a better figure than you, neener neener neener'.

That´s good. I Think if someone is searching for " Wizard" " Soldier " " Knight " or something in Google and get a picture of a 1:6 figure made by one of us, he will definitly think " Hey, Man ! Look at this ! I will spend 300 $ for a Plastic figure immediately and I will be one of these excellent guys too   Let´s join the OSF Forum !

Sounds crazy, but that was the way I joined the hobby eight years ago