Staffing The importance of Soft Opening and how-to?

[anthrxmilkshake 86]

So I'm new to the world of opening forums. As it is I've found I have an affinity and specific love for the JCink forums, I've accustomed myself to the coding of them, can do most things within reason without aid, and have over 17 years of RP experience under my belt. Therefore I feel confident in my ability to both provide great storyline and offer wonderful support in a forum ownership position. That being said my only real experience is opening forums that were hosted on another social media site (with the initials VF if anyone knows where I'm coming from, if not don't worry. Lol ), and thus am  falling under the category of teaching an old dog new tricks. 

 

I've recently come into the knowledge that some forums, if not the vast majority of them, perform what is called a soft opening. From what I've gathered so far this is basically where you gather your friends and such to RP on the site, test things out, find bugs and typos, etc. However, for someone like myself who is only just getting back hardcore into the world of RP, my friend list is relatively short. I'm not sure how to go about doing this when I've not got the filled list of friends that it requires to do so. So here are my questions in full:

 

001. How important do you feel a soft opening is to a forum? Does it make or break it? Will it aid in getting it off the ground faster? What are some pros and cons to doing this. I'm not just asking people whom have done it, but anyone whom has thought about doing it, or just plain old has an opinion of it. 

 

002. How do you go about doing these sort of things? Especially when your friend list of 'beta testers' is about as pathetic looking as when you open your wallet for spending money and a moth flutters haplessly on passed your face. Are there places to post a link just for a soft opening? Or do you just advertise a couple of places? I find putting your forum up in any actual directories constitutes a full fledged opening, so that can't possibly count.

 

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. 

[Cyn 52]

I've never done a soft opening and never even seen a board that does this, although obviously they do. My sites have all been successful without them! You do what makes you feel most comfortable.

[Uaithne 543]

I think I've only done one soft opening on a site. Like you, I haven't had many rp buddies to be able to fall back on in order to be able to do this. But on my current site, I was able to email the people of my previous Hunger Games rp from several years ago and see if they'd be interested in the current rp I had planned. It worked out very well, and they were a huge help.

 

That said, I have had successful games without soft openings. While soft openings have their uses, the success of a board isn't entirely dependent on them, either. Ultimately what matters is how loyal the admin is and if they will stick through the difficult first few weeks or months, which are often the hardest for gathering members. So don't count yourself out if you don't have the ability to do a soft opening.

 

If I couldn't do an actual soft opening, I'd still try to drum up interest beforehand by placing a link or a 'coming soon' banner in the signature on various resource sites, placing a thread in interest checks (RPG D is very good for this), and hunting around for staff members.

[anthrxmilkshake 86]

You guys are all incredibly helpful! I knew I joined this site for a reason, lol. Thank you for all of your opinions. I definitely feel less trepidatious about my lack of the ability to hold a soft opening for my new forum. I'm super excited about this concept but I was incredibly worried about my lack of a friend list to help out with it. This all makes me feel that much more secure in what I'm doing, so I'm going to go ahead and push forward with it! <3

[Elena 546]

If you have one or two friends to join with you, create a couple of characters and write a few threads together before the actual opening, it is good. Because people don't join if they don't see already the site being active...

 

I did it exactly this way, and I think it was good.

[Uaithne 543]

Yeah, I've seen that more people are leaning on soft openings recently. I wonder if there is a way to harness this so that people without a support system can still have folks to turn to for the soft opening. If so, how would one progress from soft opening to full opening without damaging the board?

[sid 5]

I did a soft open on my site with only one person on my friends list who was able to help out, and it was more of a "start playing and see what you like, but I might be changing things a bit still" phase. I had a lot of players join in the 2 weeks we had the soft open (we had a special promo where they could get their second rank abilities for free, whereas normally they're bought with points) so I was able to see what was working/what wasn't, find codes that needed changing, etc. If ever I open another site I'll probably be doing a soft open again just because it gives you a bit of wiggle room to say things aren't 100% fixed yet, but people can still start playing.

[Death Kitten 200]

One good way to populate a soft opening is make friends on directory forums like this one. Hang around and chat, make a few friends (we only bite when we like you, promise), and maybe a few of us will swing in to help out.

 

As others have said, the soft opening is mostly for shaking the bugs out, and getting everything settled. You don't necessarily need people you already know, but just make sure that everyone knows you're still getting things up and running. I certainly didn't plan to do a soft opening on my game, but it just kinda happened  when I let players get registered ahead of time and they all started writing together.

 

Whichever way you choose to go, best of luck getting your new game off the ground. It's so much work, but it can be so rewarding too. Enjoy it!

Edited June 13, 2017 by Death Kitten

[anthrxmilkshake 86]

Man thank you all for your opinions. I've recently come to the realization that a few friends I've told about it didn't quite understand how the RP worked, and I've been forced to rethink it. It's probably going to get a complete revamp, so I'm rethinking everything in general. Soft openings seem to be difficult to do if you don't KNOW people because pretty much all resource sites will not allow any kind of advertisement of a forum without a fully fledged directory link, which means there really isn't a way to do this without having some friends. Though I do agree with Death Kitten on this, getting to know people through directories and resource sites is a great idea.

[Sage 289]

Actually, a lot of resource forums have a sort of "interest check" area where you can advertise a soft opening. I've been part of a few of those that ended up going smoothly. You just post up an interest check to garner some interest and see who would actually want to see a game like that, and then you can approach them privately to go over any details. That way you have people willing to test things out for you that will most likely end up sticking around for the full opening.

 

My most recent site actually utilized a soft opening (we opened after an old site had closed, and invited the old members into our soft opening) and it went amazingly well. The site had some complicated battle mechanics at work at first, so we needed help working out the kinks. Plus my coding was a mess so I needed people to test things out and help me find errors. Plus, it helped that they all made characters and started populating the board with posts so that by our full opening, we looked active and ready to go!