Whats unique about Habbox?

[Martin]

I have to agree with all those points, to be honest Habbox isn't really considered unique at the moment besides from it's very slow speed really.. But yeah, I noticed the events calendar problem earlier when someone in HxHD asked what events are on, I thought this updates from the forum events calendar anyway? :S

The newsletter is just pointless, it basically offers nothing and is hardly ever updated, perhaps get a manager to post a monthly summary in the announcements forum for each month going over the new updates on Habbox, HxL and HxF instead.

As for generators, I'm trying to get as much generators as I can so some new ones should be coming soon.

With the Newsletter, I did offer to revamp the Habbox news section (Which is currently a brokenish feed from the announcements on the forum).

I was going to do like possibly a weekly article summarising what happened that week in terms of community events, things habbox did, staff updates, forum updates, site updates, etc.

Whilst as you say this could easily be done on the forum, I think having an updated sumarry like this would be quite a nice thing to have on the site, and if it's in article format- it serves as kind of a history to what's happened lately in the habbox world.

As I said, I offered to do this as a news departmenty thing making use of the 'Habbox News' section which tbh I can't really do much with in it's current state. The Newsletter was then published in July, thus making it silly for me to go ahead with that idea.



I can't really reply to many of the other points, as I'm mostly in agreement that it's been a slow patch lately- and things do seem to be taking a while to get sorted. I know there are lots of ideas floating around, and a lot of things are eventually down to Jin (who hasn't been on much lately due to real life commitments). I'm sure now he's back things will pick up pace.

However, in the meantime- we can (and should) concentrate on what we've got, and work on ways to improve it and customize it to ensure that we are still attracting people to the site.

[HotelUser]

I can elaborate a little bit concerning why the events calendar hasn't been updated however I'm sure Roxy will be able to explain this in more detail.

It's always been the responsibility of the Assistant Events Manager to update the calendar and our calendar had been up to date until the last Events Manager resigned from the position. In the previous week there was discussion of utilizing a script to automatically draw up a calendar for the site which worked in coherence with the forum's calendar too and that's currently on the todo list.

With regards to V6 there has been more discussion amongst us about it this past week than there has been since the project begun. I can also say that the coding process has been going on for a little while now and we're making steady progress in that aspect too. I think it's important to remember that we don't have a paid task force tailored to the task and all contributions thus far have been good natured and free.

[-Nick]

You mist one thing Competitions prizes need to be quicker ! but totally agree

Whats unique about Habbox? Why should people use it? What are they getting that is different?

Talk about a new Habbox.com site layout has been going on since January this year, but nothing has happened. It was set for release this summer, yet we have heard nothing...
Matt made this sticky last month and its still stuck but we have not heard anything
http://www.habboxforum.com/showthread.php?t=662821

News Section...
Well Habbo news has not been ideal for fansites posting news.

The Newsletter section is for July. Its September now.

Events calendar says there are no upcoming events. Seems like the managers cannot be bothered updating it. I have posted about this before but its obviously not improved.

Competitions Section on the site says the last competition ended on 13th August. - Not been updated in over a month.

I am sure Roxy916 said she will update the Competitions section of the site but yeah not happened.

Rare Values
Market place has meant this is no longer unique.

It seems Habbox is struggling to even update some minor pages, how do you expect users to keep coming back? They will check the Events calendar, see its completely blank and leave it. They will see the competitions page, see its a month old and leave.

Forum is still pretty active which is good.

I have suggested so many times that Habbox needs unique stuff like scripts on HabboEmoticon. They have amazing generators and I have seen so many people here use it in their signatures. Thats what unique about them.

What unique about Habbox? Before it was rare values, now whats unique? Why should people use Habbox? Dont say because people are friendly, it needs to offer something unique first like amazing generators etc.

Before there used to be huge prizes on the Radio every so often. The show would be advertised all over habbo, habbox and the forum for like 10 days before the event and the prize would be like a Throne. You can still do prizes like 200c or 300c twice a month on the radio to get interest.

[Roxy]

Only I can update the forum calendar which makes it hard to keep track of (I've always done it previously and when charl was here we could split the work) however I've had a lot more things to do irl so simply haven't had as much time. So, I've spoken to david and a panel is being creating which automatically updates the site calendar and can keep track of the number of events each person has done and what they were so we can give the eos better feedback when it comes to writing reports. The panel should be here in roughly a week so after that all calendars should always be fully updated and I appologise that the calender isnt already being updated regularly. I agree it'd be good to have the events / competitions promoted more on the front page but at the time we couldn't find anywhere to put the events calendar so hopefully space can be made for it in v6

I don't update the competitions page and it hasn't been my responsibility for 2-3 months

I agree about needing more Habbox rooms too. I've created a swimming pool which tends to be really popular and runs itself which should help to spread Habbox's name but obviously we need few more which I'm trying to work on too.

Sorry if any of that didn't make much sense, I'm still half asleep so I'll reply to the other points later

[xxMATTGxx]

I created that thread because at the time we was a bit stuck in terms of layout designs and have a choice to choose from when that time came up.

Sadly the way at Habbox works and what not it isn't as straight forward as let's do V6 within the Summer months, we did have to wait for Jin to come back as he does own Habbox and needs to have a say in a lot of things and wants his ideas to be implemented which are beneficial for Habbox.

Now that Jin has returned, V6 has been getting a bit further then it has for past few months which includes critical decisions/discussions being made and also an idea of what design to go for. Now from the time we have been saying wait for V6 to now, it is wrong to say nothing has been done in regards of V6 but a lot of discussion and coding examples have been done to show the General Management Team on what is basically possible and what not.

Anyway on to the newsletter that I was suppose to maintain each month, I did start writing the new one up which would cover the whole of August but sadly It never got finished and then obviously it didn't get published. I'm not going to list a lot of reasons/excuses if that's what you want to call them for it not being done but I've had to do things here and there which come before Habbox. I do apologize that hasn't been updated as much as I wanted and a new one should be out by the end of this week.

@Martin, I do like that idea of yours and if you wish to get Habbox News back in order with that sort of content then I don't have a big issue with that. Give me a shout and we can talk about it.

Events Calender: Roxy has posted what she has to say about that.

Competitions Page: It seems that page is managed by other people and not Roxy as you first thought. It is a page that needs to be updated again and I've contacted certain people to see what is going on in regards of it and hopefully get this re-started.

I don't think there is one main thing that is unique to Habbox and that is what makes people visit us and stay on the forum, site and so on. But in regards of this thread, what we need to make sure is happening is that the content/pages and things that need updating on a daily basis or every so often is being done and done to a good standard. Then with the events HabboxLive have been doing, we keep doing them when we can is a great bonus for the Habbo community. Yeah not everyone stays afterward but a few of them do, which is good news really.

The current Habbox rooms such as Roxy's swimming pool is doing really good which is alway good to see but with more of these it would be also beneficial to get the name out there.

I think that it is shocking the amount of time it's taken for the sites to be fixed it's surely over a week now? There is no radio stats and a very slow loading site that certainly isn't going to attract anybody to the site. If i go on HabboxLive and see some weird coding instead of radio stats I wouldn't be coming back to that site.

I do understand where you are coming from in regards of the website loading times and the problem HabboxLive is facing with the radio and radio statistics, It has been mentioned and reported to Jin to make sure it gets fixed and sadly due to the way Habbox runs, the servers and what not it can't be fixed by just anyone really.

I need to go and get ready for college and will post further replies later in the day.

[scott]

Habbox needs to look at making several games room owned by one person or a few managers. Maybe a TC, but a main Battleball for sure.
Give all managers and trusted staff rights and try and ensure its on popular most of the time. People will see Habbox.com on top all the time in the Games section and a few would go on it. Its the only way to do it.
Most new members start with Games rooms, so thats where Habbox needs to be popular. They slowly go to trades after using Games but by that time, if they know of Habbox, you job is done.

On the point about having more Habbox rooms, when I was assistant HabboxLive manager I created a room for HabboxLive to become an official Habbox room it was a place for listeners and the DJs to go to talk amongst each and interact with each other as I know that is something the listeners love. I went to all the bother of making the room then to be told no I was not allowed to open the room, if they want to use anything they can use the Help Desk. Which is really stupid IMO, surely any room with the Habbox/Habboxlive name is beneficial to the site I think it would have really benefited HabboxLive.

I agree there has to be more rooms on Habbo with the Habbox name, when I look in the room list I always see a HFFM event/give away and other sites as well, I don't think I ever see Habbox there :p I know habbox doesn't have much furni (Which I was quite surprised about) but give aways and popular rooms need to be created to get the Habbox name on habbo!

Only I can update the forum calendar which makes it hard to keep track of (I've always done it previously and when charl was here we could split the work) however I've had a lot more things to do irl so simply haven't had as much time. So, I've spoken to david and a panel is being creating which automatically updates the site calendar and can keep track of the number of events each person has done and what they were so we can give the eos better feedback when it comes to writing reports. The panel should be here in roughly a week so after that all calendars should always be fully updated and I appologise that the calender isnt already being updated regularly. I agree it'd be good to have the events / competitions promoted more on the front page but at the time we couldn't find anywhere to put the events calendar so hopefully space can be made for it in v6

I don't update the competitions page and it hasn't been my responsibility for 2-3 months

I agree about needing more Habbox rooms too. I've created a swimming pool which tends to be really popular and runs itself which should help to spread Habbox's name but obviously we need few more which I'm trying to work on too.

Sorry if any of that didn't make much sense, I'm still half asleep so I'll reply to the other points later

The swimming pool is a good idea, the few times I've been in there it's always been quite busy :p

Is there not a Senior events organiser? I thought they had the ability to update the calendar I'm sure ben and molly did when I was events staff

[Inseriousity.]

Regarding the Competitions page, comps management decided that rather than PMing roxy saying 'hey new comps, put them on the page', we'd cut out the middle-woman and do it ourselves. Unfortunately, this didn't work out so well but we'll get back on track with that. Easily solved.

There is nothing unique about Habbox at the moment. Personally, I think the vast majority of guides are pointless and don't offer much to the reader. I know for a fact however that v6 will solve this problem. There are tons of good ideas that are being planned for it. The problem is that there are 50 hoops to jump through before you can actually start. Hopefully with Jin here, it'll be done before Christmas as they planned but I'll confess that I would not be surprised if it wasn't 2011 before we got something.

[Grig]

Right I'm here for the low down cent down of my views, some of these phrases have just been made up btw.

Anyway news: love it, great quality. BUT and this is where I go against it, and I was aware of this when management. Habbox News' glory days are long over, because now Habbo posts all the news, it is very difficult to promote. The only time when news became popular again was the reviews and exclusives we had in the build up to the merge. I would like to see more exclusives, not a re-written because that simply doesn't cut it anymore. Also the long essay types that used to work need to be cut down and witty.

HabboxLive, dying at the moment due to broken stats and lag from what people told me. I think HabboxLive's reliance on listeners from the main site has now gone and it needs to work on it's own to bag in the listeners. I seem to also see people spamming MSN for DJs so maybe more quality DJs hired etc. Basically it's thinking outside the box in the sense that you need big shows such as vault shows etc. This is how HabboxLive initially gained success when Adzeh was manager, it is time to implement an Adziology, where there may not be 50 DJs, but good quality ones who are dedicated. Use rough tactics like head hunt and as long as you don't do this from CH then it's fine LOL.

Rares, I like. Always been the heart of Habbox. I still solely use the Habbox rares, mostly cause I have never actually used marketplace and am old school. Keep them and re-vamp them to get more people to want to use them, like Dan said so good stuff.

Your layout is stuck in an old era. There have been discussions of v6 since the start of the year and Garion is right, if this continues, there would be a downward spiral. Habbox does not offer that 'unique' and 'hip' element that it used to. It is now like a grandfather of a respirator. Yes, these similes are coming now. I think that you guys should be more reliant on the AGM content who used to co-ordinate these efforts more in Sierk's days.

Habbox has a great community, and it should be a shame to see it in decline. I would love to see HxL back in the 100s or even 200s, but it needs to take so much effort!

[Alkaz]

Thanks’ for that comment Saurav but they really weren’t as good as you make out. Quite a while ago I did suggest we made a Habbox Hospital or another themed type room as these were extremely popular when ClubHabbo and HFFM did them and for some reason or another no one really seemed to like the idea. Anyway, a while later as I’m sure most people already know there were proposals for Habbox Central and I’ve no idea how far that is on being complete but like Roxy has already said there is a room or two already open which are proving to be a big hit with the community. In terms of games rooms like Saurav said, I’m sure it was also planned for large v9 rooms will be used as events room as well as being general rooms to chill out and play in.

In terms of the events calendar, news letter and all of these types of pages I think that quiet a lot of people, me included have become lazy and reliant on scripts to do things for us and pages like donations and competitions all need to be manually updated. Pages as I say like the competitions pages should be updated by competitions management instead of X, Y and whoever else for pretty simple reasons like they know when new competitions have been posted so can be added to that page as soon as possible so people can enter them. Hopefully when v6 does arrive the events time table will be on the main page or at least a feature you can chose to have permanently on the main page every time you visit Habbox.

Most people will know that the newsletters we’ve had in previous years have fallen flat on their faces. With the current one we tried to make sure that we kept it to the bare minimum in terms of content and just supplied users with the facts and figures of the past month, this is why we agreed it would be done by xxMATTGxx and not a member of the content or news department. However, as we’ve now so obviously discovered in hindsight it didn’t work out at all as Matt is a very busy man and as he has already said, ‘Habbox’ news for the future will be discussed to keep it constantly updated.

As for scripts and generators, they’ve always been our downfall and its only really been in the recent months that we’ve had a decent team to create them. When we started to get that team together talk of v6 came about and we were almost left hanging as what to do next. We didn’t know what was going to be carried over from the current version to the next and what sort of things would be needed but as time went on we’ve gradually started to build on the stuff we offer in our fun stuff section on the site. As Skizzling said he is now working on these and has many new and pretty nifty generators coming soon which will be exciting to see. I have noticed in a few members signatures and avatars over the past months generators such as the countdown to birthday, Christmas etc in their signatures which is awesome to see and is what we’re working towards bringing you all more of.

The content we’ve got on the site is at the moment all being changed and updated quite drastically so to hopefully fit in with the standards expected of a fansite today and also the new look and feel which we will get with our new version. The content department is a very tricky department to staff now days as almost every piece of content which we used to supply was almost definitely unique to Habbox as it wasn’t really offered by any other fansite or even Habbo. Now that Habbo have jumped on the bandwagon of what fansites used to offer in terms of rare values (market place), news (news feed everywhere), guides (Habbo eXperts, guides and FAQ systems) there isn’t a great deal for any fansite to really offer. This means that a lot of the content which used to need constant and regular updates (if they’ve not been turned into automated scripts already) need once a week and sometimes not even that many updates. When a member of staff leaves or is dismissed it is usually because of time and it means that their pages which they should have kept up to date have been somewhat neglected and it takes time to build the information back up to date. The content issues could stem from me, but could go back to infrequent or back to 18, 24 months ago when Mr.OSH was the manager. With such a small department it does take time for things to be done but on the other hand there is simply no way that we could have a larger team which we’ve had previously and does not work.
In regards to v6, as Garion and others have already stated, work and serious discussion has started after talk over the past couple of months about it due to Jin being back from his real life commitments. And as Garion has said we hope that the official release of v6 is Christmas although at the moment there is obviously not a confirmed date for it. Like Garion also mentioned the management of this project has been extremely poor for several reasons. We started talking and work on v6 and were told we shouldn’t and should wait for Jin and there had been a lot of discussion and stuff being done all over the place due to confusion on management’s behalf.

Hopefully I’ve explained some of the points a little further as I know practically every post above this has said something on most areas of the site lol.

[Grig]

To add, just as a simple note; cut down on management numbers, there is way too much hierarchy. All other sites have about 5-7 people who manage and they aren't doing too bad. Habbox has like 20 (give or take a few), and I don't think everyone is needed, particularly in the smaller departments.