The March Violets’ March Revolution: The Four-Day Turn Of Fortunes For Sims Forums

We couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing this week at Sims Forums, and that wasn’t only to do with Cororon’s bizarre pictures!

So long the epitome of false dawns, big ‘apologies’ from Matt, bigger promises to ‘sort things out’, only for nothing to happen: in a nutshell, Sims Forums is now back on its feet in a big way after what amounts to a whirlwind week for them.

It’s hard to know how, where, and why for that matter exactly it all came good this week of all weeks. But it did, and we are glad.

For the unacquainted, here’s the uplifting tale of a forum that plain refused to die, no matter how much it was neglected. But first, some background (lots of words and links, so feel free to skip!)

Where Did It All Go Wrong In The First Place? The Background.

SF has been in trouble since the summer of 2010, thanks to the original hardcore of teenie members disappearing after two years rather like a Skins cast .Breebree711’s ‘Jesters’ invasion from the EA forum in August (with Maxismatt, Chemn123-Omri147, Pixpumira, etc) failed to last, not exactly helped by the botched up server move of September 2010 which took eleven days of downtime to fix, replaced their previous cyan, white and lime colour scheme for a green, white and black one that never truly caught on. The new members voted with their feet, and Sims Forums became something of a deserted hulk.

Just to make matters worse, it occured just as Cororon, the last surviving original active member, was moving from Sims 2 to Sims 3 – and she wasn’t going to spend all day hanging around a deserted forum most of the time talking to herself (bar transient members who joined, got bored after a week or two, and vanished) when she’d vampires to cook. She even drifted for a while over to the EA forum, but eventually her largely lonely dalliances on SF led to longer time elsewhere joining other forums such as Boolprop FTAF, and in turn Simpletons come their January 2011 revolution, where in time she’d become a moderator.

What remained of any sort of membership beyond her was the occasional appearences of Breebree711, Ollie (Simman23), Tom Simkins and WaffenThinMint, blue moon appearences by Ahmed, and once a lunar year ones by Bobert and Earth Mama. Don’t even start on so-called moderators Bad Romance (Munsta) and Majick, the first to vanish when times got tough.

2011 proved a year in which we were posting about them as much to keep the spirits up of those who were left as entertain our readers, largely the trio of Cororon, Minty and Tom Simkin, with the latter vanishing by the summer. The new forum format suffered problems from spambot posts, something always going to deter users. Furthermore, new people largely joined to have technical questions resolved and vanishing once they’d got what they wanted, no matter what anyone did to bring the place back to life.

The excitement of Ahmed’s involvement in the Egyptian Revolution prompted not only his return, but another flurry of activity (including the return of even Steven, Yo!WhoMovedMyCheese? and their resident pin-up girl Cassie) that sadly proved another false dawn, with Cororon’s involvement in Simpletons ever growing – besides which, having been largely ignored by Ahmed, Bobert, Cassie, Steven, etc to begin with for nigh on two years, she’d little to celebrate in truth about the old guard coming back anyway.

The same pattern as the previous summer followed – Cassie drifted away, so did all the others bar Cororon, whose appointment as a Simpletons moderator in July 2011 looked to us like confirmation that – bar a real miracle – Sims Forums was doomed to become overrun with neglect and spam, unloved and unwanted. Ahmed and Bobert were about the only two semi-regulars of the old guard left.

It would literally take us a month to come up with enough stuff to justify a post about them with, and had got to the stage Minty was arguing with the spambots in order to remain entertained.

Come August, Minty had the grandmother of all blow outs against those running Sims Forums upon Cororon’s announcement she was leaving, disillusioned over the way the place had been left to rack and ruin, and it had to be said little incentive to stay in a forum she’d been largely ignored by its old guard due to her age (ie. not being a teenager – FFS, she was in her twenties! ).

Matt promised changes, but it all proved to be hot air – making Cororon and Minty moderators so they’d have the fun of clearing up the mess Majick and Munsta had left behind and bugger all else being done. By December, SF consisted of Cororon, Minty and Ollie, and even then it was a couple of times a week at best.

Ironically, it was Skyrim that kicked off the recent latest mini-revival of interest there by giving them that rarity of something of a common interest bar Sims 3 to talk about. Purple_Penguin00 appeared, and both BreeBree711 and Somayea (Gothika) returned, but with Minty starting to post over at Boolprop FTAF (inbetween arguing with the spambots again!) and Cororon’s Simpletons duties, we were left wondering how long before this latest burst of activity ceased, with not even Cororon’s shocking revelation concerning her one and only encounter with Pescado raising much of an eyebrow.

Except this time it didn’t. Minty, Ollie and the returning Earth Mama started legacies, they picked up Rainslace starting a legacy there also. But again, for how long?

Then came the events of this week when the whole forum was turned on its head.

How The Sims Forums’ March Violets Kickstarted A Revolution

Back on 23rd February, Ollie asked for new smilies to be added to the forum – something that Matt had promised last August, but they were never added.

The long suffering WaffenThinMint’s workaround (inspired by TeeVee at Boolprop Fight The Addition False‘s idea during that forum’s move) was to post some better smileys than the ones on the board that had been targets of derision since SF’s September 2010 server move.

As Minty said back on Christmas Day, as a forum moderator he could not add the smileys to the forums ‘Add New Post’ console so this was the best that could be done as a stopgap, cumbersome though it was: necessitating forum users having two windows up, copying the location of the smiley they wanted and then posting it as an image. But with an owner that wasn’t responding to their messages (word of which leaked out to us c/o the Simpletons‘ chat and elsewhere), it was all they could do.

Matt’s post in response to Ollie’s – almost two months after WaffenThinMint’s on the same thread and the first time he’d been spotted on the forum all year – may explain what happened next.

First up, right out of the blue, Minty asked for a return to the forum’s old logo, backed up by Cororon.

Ollie and Matt suggested a logo competition…

But WaffenThinMint was unmoved, saying they had a perfectly good logo already and it was time it was returned to its rightful place as a sign this wasn’t going to be another big serving of pie in the sky, and was joined in the call for the return of the original SF logo by fellow moderator Cororon.

Of course, what Cororon was saying wasn’t strictly true, as there was SF clothing available with the September 2010 logo from the same place she’d got the stuff with the old logo (ie. here!). The problem was no one wanted to wear it because they hated it!

Meanwhile, rather than send any smileys to Matt as requested, Minty posted a link on the forum to where they could be downloaded.

It doesn’t take the most suspicious mind in the world to guess that after the broken promises of the previous August, WaffenThinMint was publicly calling Matt’s bluff. If the smileys weren’t updated, he was in no position to say he never got them. They were there for download for all to see.

At the same time, Purple_Penguin00 (now of course a moderator at Simstopia), complained along with fellow Simpletons member LRM09 about another basic forum function that had not worked since they’d joined two months back (mainly having been coaxed over by Cororon).

Two days later, Matt confirmed the smileys were added…

…and that the avatars were fixed.

Two days after this, after a one year five months’ hiatus, the original Sims Forums logo was indeed restored.

But that wasn’t all.

The sharper eyed with any familiarity with Sims Forums will have noticed that all of a sudden the more social sides of the forum that was always its strong point (ie. the off-topic stuff!) had been pushed to the top, with the forum feedback section conveniently now snug underneath where it can no longer be so easily overlooked.

Furthermore, the Sims 3 section has been tightened to just two, two other forums made sub-forums and the rest junked.

In short, anyone visiting Sims Forums is immediately presented with a view taking up their entire screen of all the active forum sections at once, and a site that previously looked dead and empty suddenly looked busy.

Now perhaps it’s all a coincidence, and Matt’s made all these changes as well after months of procrastination, but with there being one other change at SF, it doesn’t take much to see WaffenThinMint behind all this instead. He’s been bumped up to become an Administrator sometime between the 28th/29th February – and immediately what he’d demanded back in August 2011 was implemented in the blink of an eye. Coincidence? We think not.

If you’re still unconvinced, he even rearranged the post smileys so the new ones would be first in view for members going to post!

Whatever the case, the whirlwind of changes done at Sims Forums have had a dramatic effect.

There’s been a mass outbreak of enthusiasm the like of which hasn’t been seen around there for a long time, and with that, more posts. In the space of four days, there’s been seven new threads in General Discussion alone, something that used to take them over a month to achieve.

Somayea has started a books thread (although of course those familiar with SF will know about that forum’s long standing love affair with Harry Potter!), and Ollie a Minecraft thread, although we wonder just what sort of response he’s going to get for his enthusiasm towards the latest Minecraft update!

Not that Matt’s any better with his sick jokes about this week’s celebrity stiff:

Allow us, Minty, old chap!

There’s also been a rather ‘interesting’ discussion regarding Lunar Lakes, but we’ll say no more about that for now!

This time last week, SF’s active membership consisted of the theoretical. Now they can say with confidence that along with Cororon, Minty and Ollie, they have Purple_Penguin00, LRM09, Crazycatldy, Earth Mama, Somayea, LaRienne, and even the owner Matt all taking regular part (there’s always been Munsta crawling out of the woodwork, but oh well you can’t have everything!).

The rejigging there has worked wonders, and for the first time in a very long time, Sims Forums can look to the future with some confidence. March 2012 looks like it’s going to be a good one for the March Violets.