I know for a fact that some developers are using this as a marketing strategy. Is that against the rules? Also games with multiple team members have everyone posting in the thread ping ponging off one another. Is there any hope for solo developers? I feel kind of outnumbered being the only one posting in my game thread. But I will continue to post relevant information and updates even though it looks like I'm just bumping my own thread. I hope that's not frowned upon.
I got called out on "bumping" my thread, but I still don't understand why. It seems to me that there is enough traffic here that it is legitimate to want to 'bump' up a thread every day or so just to see if anyone missed it. Perhaps, at some time, this was abused. Just my two cents.
I was thinking the same thing. My thread was on the front page for probably less than an hour. With Every bump new people discover the game who missed it the first time.
I've just posted on the thread about my game TiltStorm. I wanted to share the news about a really good review and didn't do it to bump the thread. But I can understand people getting annoyed by deliberate bumping, something which can be abused. It does make it difficult being a lone developer, it means my game thread has me as thread starter and last poster (ironically it was 99c_gamer, starter of this thread, who was last poster until then), which makes it look as if i could be just bumping.
if something is of no interest to people threads will land on the second page at one time.. not every title can be discussed in length by alot of people.. bumping your own thread imho(!) make you begging for attention which looks sad.. just don't do it.. if you have really some news thoose posts are not "bumps".. thats a different storie then.. and as for fake "discussion"... well you never know for sure who is where.. so its hard to argue on such things.. but a large thread does not mean anything publicity wise.. if you think huge bunch of customers are browsing the forum you are wrong.. we are the nerds around here the mass market doesnt even know or care that this place exists.
front page The way I see it there is alot of people viewing this and other websites. So as far as exposure toucharcade has plenty and games on the 1st page will sell more than in 2nd page. That said yes there are people who have way more comments and people interested in thier thread. There might be bumping but I dont think its paid bumping. Also some developers have fans who follow all thier threads too. Life isnt fair , but just bust your @$$ and hopefully you do well.
Well the gaming forum threads are also on the front page so if TA wont write about your game it's an easy way to get free publicity if your game is being "discussed". I'm doing like Moonjump only occasional bump whenever there's big news about the game. It will gain momentum on it's own once there are enough word of mouth. I think.
I think the basic rule of thumb (at least one that I try to follow) is to only post if you have something meaningful to share. If I see a thread with a bunch of garbage in it, I'm going to permanently ignore it even if I see that there are new posts in it every day. Also, you have to ask yourself, is a game popular because it has an active forum thread or is there an active forum thread because a game is popular? There is a definite correlation but causation is not so clear. Anyways, if it seems that nobody is interested in your game, you can keep trying to improve it but I think eventually you've got to move on to your next project and hope that your next project may help players discover your first game (if indeed lack of discovery was to blame in the first place).
I think that's the key message here. There's only so much forced marketing you can do on a product. I think a lot of developers (rightly) fear their app will get lost at sea, but if your game is good enough you shouldn't have to go to ridiculous lengths (like hiring people to post on a forum) to market the game. As for bumping I think if you're posting something you yourself would value reading, then go for it. Otherwise it just looks like those fake updates on the App Store... "Uh we moved a comment line a bit further down... get v1.0001 now!!"
I have to admit, back when the Ground Effect thread was active, if someone posted a question I would wait several hours before posting a reply to give two bumps for the price of one. I managed to avoid ever being accused of bumping though. Do people really pay others to do it?
I'm in the same boat as the OP - sole developer trying to get noticed with zero marketing budget and am conscious of blatantly bumping my own thread. I only post to reply to questions, post news on updates/promos or like recently ask people for specific gameplay feedback to go into the next update. In many ways it seems futile as an hour later it's back on page 4+, and as we know because of the awkward way you page in forums few people bother to go that far. Why are the page buttons so small? Viewing forums on the iPhone paging is a real pain. Basically someone needs to reinvent a standard forum interface for the touch-screen generation. Perhaps the best way to get noticed is to just partake in the forums generally about allsorts of topics and others' games, in the hope that your eye-catchy avatar and signature gets some attention. (And of course no harm in giving your game a mention when it's relevant). If I had time to do 30 posts per day I would - but my time is spent on the awesome imminent update to Lead Wars featuring a Map Creator and vs-CPU play! </blatant_not_so_ironic_plug>
People have the intent to see new things when they come here You have the intent to sell as many games as possible So when you keep bumping your messages people will get annoyed, same thread popping up all the time. You will probably come up with some excuse like "people wont mind it when i do it a few times" .. they will and you are not the one to decide what people find annoying and what not. When users have to click through 5 pages full of bumps before they can come to new sensible, worthwile forum content, then they will end up leaving this place. The bumbing of own threads forces your tread upon the viewers, viewers lose controll. It is very very close to spamming. When you look at a game like WoW and the trade channels then you can always see a number of overzealous 13 year old spamming the trade chat channel to hell and back. It annoys the players alot. As a forum user I expect to see relevant content on the boards. Not perpetually pumped crap posts like "OMG ME 2!!!" just to have the post on front page again. If you dont have worthwhile content then dont post (or have people post it for you). I would expect nothing less than warnings or bans of those that literally abuse the mechanics of a forum only for their selfish gain (which most likely ruins the experience of the reader for which the board was created).
You assume/exaggerate many things with this post. First of all, who determines what was posted and then 'bumped' isn't interesting to some users? The mods and forum admins. Next - I've not seen 5 pages of useless garbage on this forum. At most its one post per page that I say to myself 'wow, I wish I had those 10 seconds back'. But the thirteen year old down the street might have liked to read that bumped thread about a Justin Beiber voice changer app. *Shudders at the thought* The viewers have no control over what they see. Whether its a developer bumped thread, or a thread where all the 13 year olds on this forum are talking excitedly about the dreaminess of the Justin Beiber voice changer app, it will be on top for a short time, then disappear into the abyss. The only way to shield yourself from the unwanted garbage is to only view the forums in searches (and by the way, the search engine here doesn't work well enough to be a good shield). Bumping a post saying nothing but 'bump' or 'jfkdls' or what have you *IS* spamming - that we agree on. Those people should be reprimanded. However, I agree with the other devs that have spoken on this thread, bumping the thread with news about the app is acceptable as far as I'm concerned. This is what I've been doing with the Go Native! thread. This means any kind of news; news about updates, contests and anything else that could be interesting to any kind of reader that visits the forums. WoW trade spam may be annoying to you, but to the 24 other raiders it discovered, or to the buyer of that Epic Belt of the Gods he's been trying to sell, it was interesting. Keep in mind there are plenty of points of views to that 'WTS [Link] 50,000g' spam you said annoys you. The last thing I wanted to refute is you're last line, banning someone who abuses the mechanics of a forum. Abusing and using smartly to your advantage is 2 different things. 'Bump' abuses. '5 new questions added to our database' is smart. Keep that in mind before you report posts, the Mods of this forum (and the others you frequent) will appreciate it.
The way I've always felt about bumping is that it isn't bumping if you've got something substantial to add. For instance, if your thread hasn't gotten any traffic lately and you just submitted an update. It's entirely a-OK to be like "Hey dudes just submitted an update here's the change log." and/or "Hey dudes, update just got approved check out this list of fixes from before." Similarly, "I put together a new trailer" and other things of interest are also OK. If someone is consistently just bumping threads posting things devoid of content, feel free to report them. At the end of the day, I'm not sure how much this really matters from a sales/marketing perspective. Sure, bumping threads gets it in front of more people's eyes, but if your game isn't interesting enough for people to talk about, I'm not sure bumping it back up would do anything. Great example of this: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=63025
I've put in bold what I think is a great rule of thumb for posting on your own threads. Regarding the last sentence, do updates have any visibility anymore?
