I want to start this off by thanking the members of this community who have made this site a part of their trips around the internet on a daily or weekly basis. Without you guys we never would have survived the launch of this place back in October of '08. It doesn't matter how you heard of MforMature or why you came here, the fact that you're still here speaks volumes about the overall community and I can't thank you enough for being here.
What I want to discuss, and I do mean have an open discussion amongst the members here, is the merging of MforMature with eXophase. The Staff have been discussing this for well over a year and to be perfectly honest and transparent, I think it's safe to say that I was the one dragging my heels and not wanting to do this the most. (NeilR being a close second by my estimation.)
For those of you that might not be aware, eXophase is owned by x3sphere, who is currently one of the Administrators here and he was previously our source of front page news while we were getting our legs established at launch. The reason I bring it up is to assure you that all parties involved in discussing this have been on the same page since day one. What has become clear over the past few months is the immense potential for propelling things to the next level if we pull our efforts together; so do not read this as any form of defeat from the community here, because it is most assuredly quite the opposite.
I'll get right to it and talk about what will be lost and what will be gained. The immediate and biggest change will be that the MforMature name will be gone, and believe me when I tell you that this was the toughest pill for me to swallow. I like our name, and while it initially brought about thoughts about the adult film industry from some, I always associated it with a mature gaming community. We will also be losing our Front Page, which isn't the biggest loss since not a lot of the members here go to it for a source of news to begin with since we integrated the articles with the forum. Along those lines, it should be noted that while the MfM Front Page won't make the move entirely, our unique content will be merged in and eXophase will essentially branch out to include some non-gaming categories; moreover, the MfM comment highlighter addition to WordPress will also be implemented. To be honest, that's really all that will be lost from this merger, so if you can handle that, it should be a success.
What we will be gaining is the traffic that eXophase has. We plan to migrate and move our entire forum structure with every thread, every post, every member, and every plug-in over to eXophase and it will replace the current structure over there. eXophase's front page recently had a remodeling and it looks great. The current forum theme over there will be replaced with one that matches the front page redesign and we will be bringing over our Dark Theme to offer a choice and a level of consistency from here.
We also feel that by making this move, our community will be gaining more exposure from the high numbers of Guests that eXophase currently has viewing there all day long. With the greater exposure, I'd gamble that more quality members will be inclined to join and make the daily discussions more fruitful. From a Staff perspective, what a larger community allows us to accomplish is greater exposure to the marketing and PR world of video game publishers. x3sphere has done a great job of making contacts and being on distribution lists when new press releases hit the wire and it's also something that I've worked on almost daily since we launched MforMature back in 2008. What we are working towards is the ability to start earnestly receiving and reviewing new games directly from publishers and making our presence known at some of the larger industry events like E3. In order for us to accomplish that, the merging of the two sites is a necessity.
So that is basically the top of the trees view about why we plan to do this. As of right now, there is no "when," but it will be acted upon soon if the community is on board and trusts us enough again to make such a big change.
I'd like to open this up for discussion and would greatly appreciate your honest criticism and feedback about this decision. Please discuss it openly and if you have any direct questions about some of the minutia, feel free to post them and a Staff Member will be able to answer you directly.
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Originally Posted by NoEffex
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