[Stabbsworth]

Originally Posted by Chloe

I would say not all of them are scams, I have known folks that sold assets to these sites cause they were quitting and had no use for them.

I think some new minigames would be nice. I'm actually hoping to maybe code a little game where you have to collect cheese as a mouse and avoid cats. I also want to make an updated version of Mouse Trap from the Atari system.

Think most other sites have multiple programmers and I decided to file a ticket concerning that account. :/ if I can get a pin reset, I can safely change the info then contact the owner esp since have came across the account being listed for sale by someone who is not the owner so yea.. black market sites are not fun, I only keep tabs on them cause a friend's account got hacked and I'm waiting to see if it comes up for sale. Plus gives you inside knowledge of what to look out for if you design online games.

if you can build up a small portfolio, i think both toho and coda might consider taking you on? though it's possible that they still might refuse, since coders aren't entirely needed right now.

an important thing to note is that we don't make enough money to do salaries. hence why artists work on a commission basis. i'm not sure if this is true for coders, mind you, i'd have to ask coda on that topic.

also, yeah, voltra does feel really goddamn cliquey now that you've mentioned it, Kaderin. it doesn't help that one of the main ways to gain volts would be to spam in a thread on The Undercurrent.

[Kaderin Triste]

Seems it's always been cliquey then
I joined probably a few months after it opened.
Once in a while (every 6-12 months) I pop in...idk just to see if anyone's cared enough to message me? But I haven't been active on there in a very long time.

(Logged in just to see if my memory was right and yeah. I joined in 2017, probably shortly after the site was fully opened and quit about a year later in 2018.)

And I could understand it being cliquey if it had been a few years before I'd joined or something because by then people would have had gotten some pretty solid friend groups...but it was a new site. XP

Admittedly, my very first post there wasn't exactly positive as I made it pretty clear that I wasn't exactly thrilled with the avatar style and as good as said I was only joining so a friend would stop bugging me about it...so that probably didn't help any.

But then they also had to suddenly shut down the site for a couple months that first year too (I don't remember exactly why, but if I were more ambitious I could dig it up), which only solidified my negative feeling toward Voltra tbh.

[Boris]

Originally Posted by Kaderin Triste

I haven't followed much of this thread, but wow...kinda glad I left Voltra before all the questionable/bad items came out...

I mean, I left probably less than (or maybe just over I don't really remember) a year after joining just because even as a new site it felt really cliquey. Like...I would post in a thread and be completely ignored, but someone else would post and get responses from everyone else in the thread. And it wasn't just once or twice, but pretty much in 90% of threads I posted in. The other 10% were responses from friends I knew from other sites first...

That's sad and boring. Boring because you don't get to have fun because no one wants to interact with you, and sad because you wanna have fun with others but are shunned by the crowd. At least you didn't torture yourself and continued to stay and get ignored, though on the flip side, if you stayed, people might start taking a liking to you. It's not much of a loss, though.

Looking at your latest post, I remember seeing a thread like that on Voltra... interesting. I did make an alt account, but uh... I don't really use it. Not supposed to anyways since well, ya know... ban evasion. I don't even remember the username XD

[KittyBeary]

Originally Posted by Boris

Voltra having a black market... hmm, I wonder if those whom I talked to are still there or if they bailed. I think ads saying they sell virtual currency are all scams.

Pantheon is on my "to leave" list. I'm just needing to save up money and commission owed art, and then I'm gone, like a ninja in the night.

Voltra has a black market?? o_O Damn....

[Boris]

Originally Posted by KittyBeary

Voltra has a black market?? o_O Damn....

That's what I've gathered, but I may have misread what the rumour mill had said.

[KittyBeary]

Yikes. Now I'm even less interested in logging into Voltra. >_> (I also feel bad for donating to them >:C )

[Stabbsworth]

that's fucking wild.
none of the other avi sites i've been faffing around on have anything of the sort.

[Boris]

I mean, like I said, I may have misread or misinterpreted. At best, the items they sell are questionable.

[KittyBeary]

Well, I'll still be skeptical about them for now :x

[8Nephila8]

This thread gives my toxic little heart much joy right now.

[Boris]

How come?

[Illusion]

To me Avatar sites and online social media forums have evolved into VRchat where you can know physically just take equip avatars and talk to people.

Individual forums are sort of just used for dedicated sites to communicate with people, but most people prefer to go over to reddit, twitter or facebook.

Honestly the role of avatar creation and items makes more sense now to exist in the 3D space. I can't really think of any options out there to truly customize a 3D avatar that you can then easily import to VR hangout sites. It's still new tech but I think this is just the evolution and step forward. And have for a long time.

But there is still a forum aspect of having discussion, a certain etiquette of bring up topics in VR spaces that is lost. But then gets covered by Reddit, and there is no real combination of the two.

[Coda]

Originally Posted by Chloe

I don't think there is any way to code a kill switch into any code, it would be against any programmer's ethics to do that. Most likely the code is probably such a mess, no one else wants to touch it.

A kill switch isn't all that rare. It IS unethical, yes, but it's also kind of common among freelance developers. It's considered a defense against getting screwed over -- if you do work on a contract but you don't trust your employer, the kill switch gives you leverage. If they don't pay you, they don't get to keep the code. What are they going to do, sue you? They were so cheap that they wouldn't pay a developer. A lawyer is going to cost way more.

Of course, where it turns from merely unethical to actively criminal is when the developer uses it for extortion.

[Stabbsworth]

Originally Posted by Illusion

To me Avatar sites and online social media forums have evolved into VRchat where you can know physically just take equip avatars and talk to people.

Individual forums are sort of just used for dedicated sites to communicate with people, but most people prefer to go over to reddit, twitter or facebook.

Honestly the role of avatar creation and items makes more sense now to exist in the 3D space. I can't really think of any options out there to truly customize a 3D avatar that you can then easily import to VR hangout sites. It's still new tech but I think this is just the evolution and step forward. And have for a long time.

But there is still a forum aspect of having discussion, a certain etiquette of bring up topics in VR spaces that is lost. But then gets covered by Reddit, and there is no real combination of the two.

theoretically, we could get an influx of people if we advertized some, given that VRChat is implementing anticheat that runs on a kernel level.

of course, that assumes that people still use forums or know how to use forum software, along with teaching them how to use the avatar portions of the site, given that we don't use 3d models that you can just get from an in-game browser.

[Biomecha]

And now Pantheon just announced it is shutting down. I liked it there even though I mostly lurked.

[Espy]

Originally Posted by Biomecha

And now Pantheon just announced it is shutting down. I liked it there even though I mostly lurked.

Huh. Why? Just not enough traffic? They’re not all that old, though.