Do we actually still need UPSB Forum? Part 1: Confronting the value of UPSB

I cannot remember exactly when UPSB v5 has shut down, but it seems like it has been a long time. With that reason, it has made the PS community disbanded into multiple small communities from varied social network mediums. Although other community sites such as JEB, FPSB, THPSC etc still alive, it is still valid to say UPSB was a large pillar of the whole PS community. It was certainly not the brightest moment in anyone's penspinning career, but penspinning certainly did not die. This is thanks to those individuals who were passionate enough to take initiative into creating their own circles. Two individuals I think of for this matter will be Mango and Hobby, both from UPSB formerly. While these two's approaches were quite different into actualizing a penspinning (hereinafter referred to as PS) community, they are nonetheless very large contributors to the community. Of course there are many other individuals who have done similar activities, and they surely deserve credit as well.

While these small communities have served as very good emergency measures with the collapse of UPSB, there is still one question that remains unanswered (the title of this article ofc).

Do we actually still need UPSB Forum?

Do we?

Well, supposedly these small communities serve as a temporary substitute for our former glorious community medium right?

The reality is, recreating another UPSB Forum takes alot of manpower, skill, money and a tremendous amount of time. And to have no tangible return for doing so, is much more the reason why not alot of individuals are willing to take such risk. Yes I said it, it is a large risk.

Still, there are still some people who wish for the revival of UPSB, a scapegoat who is willing to scrape their time for a community that might or might not prosper. To what extent would someone be willing to do such thing? This article attempts to serve the purpose; give a solid ground for the revival of UPSB and refute agaisnt otherwise. Without a good reason, no individual would take action, let alone have a team of members who are motivated for the same reason. I would think that by the end of this series, it would answer some questions that some spinners had in mind but did not reach an answer for themselves, including myself.

This article will be part 1 of a 3 part series to answer this question. The parts will be separated to:

1. What made UPSB so special? Identifying the characteristics of the medium.
2. List down alternative options (including currently used ones) PS communities could use.
3. Evaluate those options and clarify what is best for the PS community.

This has a similar approach in problem solving to the scientific method with the basic sequence of identifying the problem, collecting information to answer the problem, and reach a educated conclusion based on the conclusion.

Now obviously, down this journey we might not reach a satisfactory conclusion simply because my research skills and utilization of resources is not fully adequate, but hopefully this will encourage others to pose the same thought process and maybe take initiative. That is the motivation for me to do this study. Now let us go into part 1.

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What made UPSB so special? We miss UPSB v5 for many reasons because we do not have these luxuries in our current community medium. However, us former members and new members (who unfortunately never had experienced the engagment of v5) think this way mainly due to sentimental reasons. At least at my current state, I think its mostly sentimental. In reality we are doing very well without the forum, although it may not be suitable for the PS community for several reasons.

To answer what made UPSB so special I would like to answer three sub-catergorical questions.

Why do we need UPSB?

I would like to answer this intuitively first, because our intuitions usually come from actual valid reasons that may be subtle as first. So this section would be the most subjective section of this article.

I personally want UPSB, because I think many spinners are not satisfied with how PS communities operate. Or rather it is not at its best state. A community in the internet should be more interactive not only in terms of being able to chat with many people as possible, but it should also allow deeper relationships with other spinners. And I think UPSB was able to that.

Another reason why I think we need UPSB is because it is the most suitable format for community growth. Referring back to my previous sentiment, if there is more deeper connections with individuals in the community it will lower the amount of spinners leaving and encourage more people to join the community. It would also create strong long lasting relationships with others, just like how I personally experienced in past forums. This is something that I want the newcomers experience in later generations. So...

What kind of characteristics of UPSB made it special?

Let's translate my sentiments into actual substance. I have mentioned two whys of the necessity of UPSB: user satisfaction & community growth tool. I would also like to mention the ability to archive in an organized fashion as another necessity, but this is rather a more valid reason than a sentimental reason. We will get to that later.]

User satisfaction would mean forum features that were convenient for community activity, engagement and interaction. This could also be associated to the community growth factor as well. In the UPSB forum there were multiple features that encouraged community activity and interaction; live chatting system, posting system, private messaging system and group system. UPSB had the following features for this:

• Shoutbox
• Private messaging (to individuals and multiple users)
• Sub-forums, and commenting system (with engagement tools such as 'Like' system, quoting.
• Team creation (team exclusive forums which could only be viewed by invited members).
• Tinychat

These tools or features are partially what made UPSB valuable. There are other important factors that also have value that connects to user satisfaction.

• Trophies, accomplishments
• Personal profile pages that were customizable
• Variety of post types (polls, battle voting, etc)
• Premium membership features
• Games

Another definite characteristic UPSB forum had that was valuable was how it was able to store all information at its state since its last activity, and how organized that was. This is essentially an advantage of any internet forum. Another value UPSB had was its ability to watch past content and its covenient search tool to find the desired content. In one example I can think of, if there was one really good PS discussion I had in the past I wanted to read I can first search by keyword, category or even from user post history and look at the past conversations. UPSB also had its own wikipedia which served purpose for newcomers and R&D people. I was not sure if this characteristic is sentiment though, if this characteristic is a means for reflecting back to the good memories as a community member, maybe it could be.

This is kind of the main point of this section, but I think all these characteristics leads to a creation of exclusivity and brand as a member of UPSB. This is the reason why people would go back to UPSB, stay there and encourage newcomers to stay as well. Some people may argue PS needs more media attention to bring more newcomers, but in current digital society I do not think media attention is the only way to bring in newcomers. As long as the brand and exclusivity remains, members will stay and continue activity and create new content which would eventually attract newcomers. This will essentially increase the value of UPSB as a community.

In the end, all this value and its storing information contributes to user satisfaction which is core reason why people would come back or stay in the community. In short, an effective community platform is necessary for community growth. However, what I did here was basically list only the good things UPSB had offered for the community. If the platform was all mighty good, then UPSB would not have shut down, especially for financial reasons. So in the next section, we may perhaps tackle why UPSB has shut down and how we can possibly improve it. Eventually to create value in UPSB as a community and as a forum.

How can we improve UPSB to increase its value?

First and formost, increasing the value of UPSB is essentially developing a sustainable community, and a well operating platform would make this development effective and efficient. To explain this I would like reflect back to some PS history.

So our main explanation when we were asked why UPSB shut down, we would answer for financial reasons. In other words, UPSB did not have a model (perhaps a business one) that was able to sustain itself. A forum requires alot of things to be established, including money. Near the end of v5 UPSB, it has relied on the finances of the administrator and premium membership subscriptions. Eventually these fees ate up the administrators personal finances and escalated its end. This model, has a fatal assumption that there will be enough dedicated members who would financially contribute to the maintenance of the forum which was not the case at the time. Consequentially, UPSB losing its value, people feel less incentive to contribute/invest into the future of UPSB.

In the beginning of penspinning, it was a group of aged adults who were new with the worldwide web but also had money and their own payment methods, and so this model was sustainable to an extent. With the internet and PS being alot of accessible for younger generations, the demographic of PS community has potentially shifted to those who are not able to financially contribute. This is just a guess, so I can really pinpoint the reasons for this phenomenon, but I am relatively confident that this is not far from the truth.

This shift of demographic lead to another phenomenon that UPSB has experienced which was the increasing turnover rate of new spinners; how the perception of PS became more of a 'fast food hobby' per say. This shift of PS perception has many reasons and definitely not singlefold. The reasons I can think of at the top of my head are, the shift towards modding, aged population that lead old spinners to leave, the decreasing speed of PS development etc. There are many topics to cover there as well, but we can oversimplify that these factors has discouraged newcomers to stay in the community. Thus they think the value of UPSB forum is not worth to put effort/time/money. So we should focus on how we can perhaps encourage spinners to stay in the community long enough to allow sustainable demography. That is to say, to consistenty have enough spinners to lead the community and keep it active. After all, for community forums, the core value are the people who operate the activities. If there are less people contributing, meaning less valuable people in the community, people would likely not to invest or contribute to a community losing its worth. This actually applies to seasoned dedicated spinners more than newcomers, since they are potential leaders of the community, and the absence of these members are fatal for the PS community. As members age, their knowledge and resources inevitably increases including the ability to make financial contributions.

For a sustainable demographic, it would mean a healthly cycle of newcomers supported by dedicated seasoned spinners developing into the future generation. To allow this to become a cycle, the operations for keeping the community active should be convenient, efficient and effective as possible. This is to lessen the hassle for the contributors. And I believe having a well operated forum would solve this. I imagine if we could add features in UPSB in a way that makes it easier for spinners to lead the community and keep it active, it would be a possibility that we should consider. That is not to say that having a well operating forum will solve everything, as mentioned before we would need very talented dedicated spinners to sustain the community. 

Putting that into perspective, I would think the following improvements could increase UPSB's value:

• a modernized business model to sustain UPSB Forum
• a mobile form of UPSB (having an app for it would drastically make a difference, but that requires alot of shit)
• higher security to the platform
• easier, accesible electronic payment method for contributors
• single/multiple features that differentiate itself from other SNS spinners use.

Apologies for the very broad statements, but the article focuses on the what community medium we would need for our PS community, not really about product design. We will cover some of that in the upcoming parts though. However, I guess that sort of lists out what we may need for our supposed futuristic UPSB community. These propositions would be my solution that makes up the mistake UPSBv5 had. Of course, these are not the only solutions, I can also imagine we could subtract the features UPSB had I mentioned earlier and incorporate external tools like discord to increase the value of UPSB.

Conclusion

Though not so organized, this was my attempt to identify what was good about UPSB forum, and what we can improve upon it to prevent another shutdown. This identification process will serve as reference when we compare the available community mediums that are in the internet. We will compare the advantages and disadvantages of the community mediums with our ideal UPSB forum. Then we measure these attributes in terms of utility (which is somewhat synonymous user satisfaction) and see which community medium is best suited for a PS community. Ideally, if our supposed UPSB forum exceeds the utility of other SNS such as discord, twitter, facebook, reddit etc. it would be enough ground to recreate the UPSB forum.

Also, some individuals reading this may have noticed, I have not mentioned the features of the UPSB forum that could be deemed as disadvantageous before answering what features to add. I would like to address this matter just make this thought process more easier to visualize. After all, this article is mostly just abstractions and hypothesis rather than tackling the actual details of the matter. That is going to be the next part, which is the hardest part perhaps.

I would like to list down other community mediums and social media and list the advantages and disadvantages it would have if it were to operate as a PS community platform. Then point out features that those only those platform can offer. Finally, evaluate those platforms to see whether we should completely make a new forum or we can replace it with other platforms or with combinations.

My direction towards this research is purely to find the optimal way for PS sustainability. So if the results show that PS community can total sustain without a forum, I would probably accept it. In the end, just to remind the reader, I just hope this could lead to something substantial enough to maybe inspire others to think or to move. Either makes it worth for me to do so.

Til Then.

Tigres