Some of y'all might the 3k member chariot event hosted by Chip, or that one western themed event Hid hosted, or the war horse event hosted by Rui.
When we sold horses for 50ac, when HARPGA had its own inktober prompts, and the free art people gifted you on your birthday.
When we were a community.
As a relic in this Amino I've stalked all those events, usually too scared to participate lmao but it happened. I miss those events. Well I guess what I'm trying to say here is that each one of us play a crucial role in fostering some kind of engagement and belonging here in HARPGA. But there's a group of people who have an extra big responsibility to achieve these things; Our Leaders and Curators.
The Leaders and Curators are supposed to be the pillars of our community. Their active involvement is vital for welcoming new , ensuring the growth of the community and entertain the already existing . Not to mention maintaining order.
How many of you know which rules currently apply? For example regarding ed/ing breeds.
I understand that everyone has their commitments and responsibilities outside of the Amino platform, and I respect that completely. Nevertheless, as leaders and curators, their role comes with certain expectations, including regular interaction and moderation. And maybe, just maybe, a solution to this could be introducing more leaders and curators to even out the pressure and responsibilities. Just a suggestion.
It is a problem when the curators are left without an active leader and the lack of communication between, well- everyone makes it hard to know what rules currently apply and who to ask.
Note that my goal is not to personally attack someone here. I am adressing a problem that has been going on for about a year or more. And to be completely honest I don't care who's fault it is or if there even is someone to blame, I just simply ask for a change.
Anyhow, I believe that adressing this issue openly and constructively is important.
I know several people who still haven't received their advent calendar gifts, persons who tried to get events approved but had to wait really long for an answer and sometimes those answers didn't quite help with the questions the member asked etc. Again, not personally attacking, just shining light on a problem that actively needs to be solved.
I also sympathize with the curators/leaders who singlehandedly tried to improve the community at different times, for example Xae who took the initiative a while ago to try to make a harpga mascot and fix the ed breed system before she gave up and resigned her leader role. Capy barely manages to get the hotm/aotm out and I understand that because he's doing it alone while being really busy.
It shouldn't be like that.
The curators need from the leaders and the other way around as well. And us need that too.
And it feels like nobody has really expressed this openly before
The only fully active community in this community is the Vast community. And while it's awesome that a closed breed can be so active with so many engaged it kinda says something about the rest of HARPGA.
I'd be more than willing to step up and help and I bet there's many more who would do that too.
We all love this place, that's why we're here, but the older (and probably the younger ones too) know that this place used to be so much more and I think we all want to
There used to be talks about having our own HARPGA Olympics and a new mascot and challenges and events for the entire community.
Let's bring back that talk.
![Hm-[C]Some of y'all might the 3k member chariot event hosted by Chip, or that one western themed event Hid hosted, o](https://image.staticox.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpm1.aminoapps.vertvonline.info%2F8974%2F21797697468bd3536047419b53b8caec190d0b99r1-2048-1536v2_hq.jpg)
Comments (34)
I totally agree with you, and I’m honestly so glad we’re talking about this now - I’ve obviously noticed this, too, and as a mod, I’ve thought a lot about how to fix all these issues. Tomorrow is my four year anniversary on Amino (wow), December will be my four year anniversary in this community (really), and February was my one year anniversary as a curator here (the age of time astounds me), so it’s safe to say I’ve been on this community for a while now. Maybe I wasn’t here during what the true original HARPGA would call ‘the good old days’, but I do when this community was much grander than it is now, and like you guys, I would love for it to be returned to that state.
If you forgive me for being a little corny for a second, HARPGA means a lot to me. I’ve made friends here and grown so much. Drawing goofy pixel ponies helped me through a lot of the past few years, and I’m sure it did so for many of you, too. I really appreciate everyone who has been patient with us and the constructive attitude we have here. I thought perhaps my perspective could help, so I’m going to write down some places where I think we’ve faced difficulties and how we could possibly fix them. Feel free to read through if you’re willing to put up with a lot of writing, some incoherent thoughts, and probably a lot of parentheses. I present Capy’s List of Issues:
1. Life. This one’s obvious, and probably the most cited and most forgiven cause of the state of the mod team and the community. We’re all familiar with the extensive hiatuses involved when life throws something in your face. It’s difficult for five people with very little time or overlap in our schedules to collaborate with one another. There’s not really much we can do about our lives needing to be lived, but as many have said, bringing in more mods would likely help.
2. Lack of communication. This one is basically just a subsection of the last one, but I think it deserves its own acknowledgement.
(Pt. 2)
3. Lack of execution. A common problem that haunts most people. We continue to come up with ideas for the community and begin to build on them, but for one reason or another, they almost never are completed. Oh, the amount of things we’ve come up with behind the scenes that have never seen the light of day. Honestly, for this one, we just need to better commit. Yes, things get in the way, but eventually we need to do something. We should focus more on one thing at a time so we can get stuff done, and for goodness sake, stop trying to make events for certain holidays or ones that need to be released by a certain time.
4. RC/RB systems. Ugh. These have been the bane of everyone’s existence because we’re just as confused about them as you are. They probably made more sense at their introduction, but as problems began to arise, we fixed them in a manner that made them into more of a folklore than a set of written rules, if you understand what I mean? Not to mention the fact that we’re kind of trying to repair them while keeping them up and running, and these combined with most of the other reasons on this list are all ingredients for a mess and, well, I don’t know what we were expecting.
5. Lack of communication with . We don’t mean to be malicious about this, it just happens, and I know it’s probably very confusing to all of you (apologies), and we should focus more on trying to fix this. We should just make more posts about what we’re thinking and doing to get community .
6. Timing. I haven’t conducted actual research on this, but here’s my hypothesis: most HARPGA are going through some sort of education, so naturally, peak season would be summer when most schools are out. During every other season, that makes this place feel a little more slow and empty. There isn’t much we can do about this, but we can prepare for the increase of activity that should hopefully occur soon and be patient until then.
Reply to: Capybara_King
(Pt. 3)
7. Jobs. We were assigned jobs a while back to evenly distribute the work. This seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, but it’s proven to make some parts of being a mod basically impossible when certain people aren’t online. As much as some of us may get individual inspiration to fix or create some things, we might not have the knowledge to do so. I suggest we make the work a little more universal again, but people can still have some responsibilities to honor our original intent.
8. Difficulty of planning events. One of the largest motivators for activity seems to be events, especially official events, since those tend to be more consistent and accessible to member of different experience. These, however, take a lot of effort to plan and execute (see point 3), and most ideas don’t make it out of the mod chat. I haven’t run this idea past anyone yet, but I was thinking we could perhaps get a small team of dedicated event planners who can help with this without needing to be mods.
9. Amino malfunctions. Yeah, this one’s no secret, either. Server crashes, getting locked out of their s, numerous bugs, ACM is apparently buggy, too. There’s not much we can do about this, to be honest, other than recognize that it does make our jobs more difficult and makes people less willing to spend time on here.
Reply to: Capybara_King
(Pt. 4)
10. General community inactivity. This becomes a vicious cycle at a certain point. You are no more to blame than us for not being online all the time, but gaining more activity is incredibly difficult. The less activity there is, the less content there is to be active around, which leads to even less activity. Most of the time when we make events, we fear they’re not going to get that much engagement and we’ll have put a lot of work into something to ultimately have it fail. The truth is that yes, this is likely going to happen a few times, but I trust that activity will pick up again soon. We just have to start with smaller events that we’ll be okay with not doing well and slowly build up to bigger ones. You all just keep being wonderful and patient with us like you have been, again, we appreciate this endlessly.
Lastly, I would like to leave you with a ray of hope. It may seem like no one’s ever on here (literally, thanks to amino’s shiny new bug that fails to display who’s online), but we’re faring much better than most other communities. For example, the December AotM and HotM polls, which each lasted three days, got almost 60 votes each, and I almost never run out of lovely art to feature. So, everyone, just keep this up, and hopefully with some changes we can improve.
rip xae’s activity i have just been informed that cheer practice is going to be all year round for my senior yr of hs :skull: if that wasn’t the case i’d 100% consider the possibility of seeing if i could staff again but it just isn’t realistic
i really tried y’all, but i will say that the guidelines have been updated by me personally a few months ago or whenever it was when i left. i think the main issue is that the wikis that were set up on my profile for ed creator and ed breeds, ect were never put up again. i hope it’ll be solved sometime soon, i know it must be frustrating for you guys
I honestly agree with this. I wish there was more stuff like how back than it was more active and more fun events that were around and a lot of new active , but now everything is pretty dry, in my opinion
Yesss omg this is exactly why I’ve been thinking!!! I when I had my old ass when I was still drawing horses on paper. Everything was great! Ppl were active, it was fun, people enjoyed drawing! But now it’s kind of sad. I’ve stepped away from this community for a bit cuz of life. But honestly, I feel like it’s not even abt drawing for fun anymore. It feels like it’s all abt money and who can draw better. I don’t like it.
As someone who has been apart of the community for a while, I completely agree! It's quite unfortunate watching this communitys activity dwindle, it definitely doesn't help that now most of the mods have been quite inactive and less community events hosted by the mod team. Hopefully we'll see some things improve and get here more active again. I also hope to see less hostilities from the as I've noticed that happening way too often and people getting away with rulebreaks.