I’m curious to hear what forums mean to you, particularly when it comes to the indie games world. Are there any sites you used to (or still do) frequent? Any features you miss from your favorite sites? If you’ve never been a forum user before, what comes to mind about them? What are your expectations? Tell some good forum stories if you’ve got 'em.
Hopefully this should be useful for figuring out ways to adjust or add to the current site.
back in the day i used to be a part of an rpg maker forum. it wasn’t the best place in the world but it was really nice having big avatars, unique titles memorising different forum moments, different forum badges and prizes. a feature they had i loved was giving little badges for forum game jam and event participation. we used to hold a several-times-a-yearly game jam with a specific theme and we’d give a little themed badge to participants and winners!
Hi hi, thanks for joining! My first start really talking on forums was around rpgmakercentral - Sometimes I still see little pings about some of the (bad) VXA scripts i worked on.
I wrote a lot of the styling rules a while back, and while I think I CAN up the size of profile icons, the site would load the 60x60 version and scale it in an ugly way. So it might take some investigation to fix that first
For now I went through and disabled all the ‘default’ badges/trophies the site provides… though I do think they are fun overall, I’d prefer to stay away from ones that are sort of gamifying engagement, like asking you to log in every day 100 days and such. It’s way better like you say to commemorate actual moments in the community’s history. I also think its fun when they are drawn by members, even if it’s programmer art haha
definitely agree, its something that will come with time + those default gamified badges etc just encourage mindless/forced engagement vs natural conversation and interaction. I think another thing that might be cool is a recent posts page? one way a lot of topics got seen was through seeing it had been made recently/had a lot of recent activity 
On the homepage there IS a link in the little orange nav tabs to latest - is this what you’re after? https://aregames.art/latest
Hmm, it gets stuck loading sometimes but thats EXACTLY what I was looking for, thank you :>
loading times may be a little wonky - the hardware and for the server is pretty good (for the money) but it’s located in germany, and im guessing its mostly traffic from north america lol. I did figure out disabling smaller profile icons, so I upped them a bit - they are 72x72 now - though it might still compress them to jpeg…
edit: also added signatures. you can turn them on in your profile settings, under the tab also named ‘profile’. you can also disable them if you aren’t a fan.
I should probably make a dedicated thread for actual site news and updates though.