As hard as it sometimes is, I am 100% behind this site,
and see it for what it was, what it is, and what it can be.
The volume of off-topic and spam, has made many people use other sites for more serious work (the same problem with Unreal Playground).
Hell even the legendary Wormbo now shows-up at ut99.org as his wisdom and experience is very welcomed.
I am a member of so many U-engine sites and forums, I do not have enough time to post in them all. There is new stuff happening all the time. People just choose not to bring it here any more.
People even choose not to link to this site, due to it's reputation.
The official Epic forums are a better option.
As amusing as certain posts here may be, they would be locked by the admin instantly over there. That is what blogs and Facebook are for.
The ut99.org site has gone from being a community place of arguments, to a clean site full of useful resources and tutorials.
People still try to bring their external arguments and selfish attitudes into the house, but the ban-hammer is hard and swift.
To be honest, the quietness of this forum is not a bad thing, as it means people have more time to fix and tweak the wiki, and deal with other admin tasks.
Many people are not aware of the huge amount of work that has still happened behind the scenes.
Since the old downloads section died, effort has been put in by many to fix the wiki into an up-to-date DL source for all your Unreal needs.
Thankyou to all those who have bothered to help, and thankyou to those who still give valid posts and input.
The forum is just 1 part of the whole.
This forum and site have much potential. Remember it is "Beyond" Unreal, and there are many, many Unreal engine mods and games that are not UT.
1 unfortunate change I would make here at BuF, would be to disable the tags on threads.
They are no longer useful as they are primarily used by the cowardly trolls. Indeed you will see a fine example at the bottom of this very thread.
I am confident that if a poll was posted, you would see all the spam-fiends would say keep it, but those of us who try to use this place as a resource, quickly learn to ignore the pointless tags.
You could argue that people can just ignore it, but the search-engines don't (they focus on it), and this place looks like a deep hole of misery and bullying as far as the search engines are concerned.
The vast majority of non-relevent keywords spammed all over this place, keep it lower in the rankings than it should be.
Real and relevant tags and keywords are hardly ever used (but thankfully are over-all the most used).
http://www.webrankstats.com/webstats/forums.beyondunreal.com
This site "is what it is". We either start again or gradually build it back into a "working" community. A centre of excellence and learning of all things U-engine.
Unless Epic stops making the U-engine, there is no reason for this site to close.
I keep meeting people online, who think that the Unreal-engine sites are a dead wasteland of abandoned sites, as the top results in the search engines do not show the genuinely active or useful.
Those top sites are older, and feature text and keywords that relate to Unreal stuff.
It is not the lack of activity by the community that as strangled this place, it is the over-activity of the trolls, and the children who cannot string together enough words to make sentences, or say, or see anything positive, or suggest any genuine options for progressing the site.
And cue the dance of the trolls......
