Welcome to Negative World. If you have any question, please read the following list and click to read an answer. If your question isn't in the list or if you have a suggestion, feel free to post a reply.

To be able to add more questions/answers to the list later, your participations to this thread will eventually be deleted to make room, after they've been answered.

Donations

Currently, the site doesn't bring in much money, and it costs about $85 a year to keep up. Not a whole lot, but the owner of this site isn't particularly rich, so every bit helps. Also, the web designer spent a lot of time and work to implement skins, navigation layout, make the site work quick and neat, and implement the options you asked him, all this instead of doing a paid professional site. The more you support the site, the better it'll run and the more potential its future will have.

Now, the FAQ...

General questions

What is "Negative World"?
What are the round icons at the corners of the site?
What are XP and user levels? Why do some features seem inaccessible to me?
Can I choose the looks and features of the site?
How does the private message system work?
Does the site have social network connections?
What is the Neverending Experience Quest?

Forum

Are there specific threads I should know about?
What do the lights on the left of the forum index mean?
What are the negative numbers on the right of the forum index? On the private message page? Level 99?
What are the little grey icons on the right of the main forum page? What are "news", "roundtables", etc.?
How can I search for specific posts?
Can you flag threads to spot them more easily?
Can I embed videos, resize an image? What's "Reference"? My links don't work, etc.?
What are the Terms Of Service?
Apart from the T.O.S. is there particular netiquette to observe with post formatting?

Game Database

How do you rate games? The games I want to rate aren't in the base? How do I write reviews?
Do you have a backlog feature? Can I see who is playing what?
How can I browse Negative World's game reviews?

User profiles

What are user profile features? Can I see who's online?
How can I browse user profiles/post history? I'm looking for a specific profile?
How can I check the system codes of other Negative World users (Wii, XBL, PSN, Steam...)?
My Steam system code on my Negative World profile doesn't link to my Steam profile!

I tried to make a Game Thread for the Fire Emblem smartphone game, but I was unable to do it. I don't think we have Game Threads for Miitomo or Super Mario Run, either. Is this a bug? Or maybe a feature?

Har har...seems like a bug to me!

Ironclad gets a game thread but Super Mario Run doesn't. Seems fair to me.

Some of these ads suck balls, and disallow you from typing in the box.

You'll be typing, and then some ad will be loading, and you'll have to physically X it out.
Happens way way way too often.

@Mr_Mustache

Ah, so that is what was happening. I thought I was going crazy, not being able to type.

I was wondering if it was just me. Obviously this is an issue, I'll have to contact Google and see what is up. Ads shouldn't be able to effect site usage.

I've noticed you can't click those ads too and they don't really look like anything, so it might just not be loading them correctly or something?

Hmm, on a side note Stache would love this, my Adsense is showing me a bunch of lingerie ads now. Considering it tailors ads to what you search for and I certainly don't look up lingerie on my work computer, I'm confused.

@Zero

You're right -- I DO like that.

What kind of Lingerie specifically? Victoria's? Frederick's? Shirley's? Something else?

Has the implementation of a more "works skin" work skin been brought up again? Gimme!
As it is, the work skin still looks like it's a Nintendo message board.

To be honest I don't have time for a huge overhaul, but maybe if someone were to look it over and try to pinpoint a few quick fixes that would make it better serve its purpose that could be managed.

*turns on Work Skin*

HA! Yeah, looks pretty Nintendoughy. I'm a book!

Oh god those stupid failed ads that stop you from being able to type are back.

Firefox is telling me not to login to Negative World because the connection is insecure.

!

@Secret_Tunnel It's doing that on any site that doesn't use "https," whatever that means. It started months ago from one of the updates. I'm not sure if it actually means anything, or if it's just Firefox being extra careful.

I've freeloaded here long enough and I got my credit card now, (fucking finally!!) so I'm more than happy to make a generous donation.

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

(Not right now, but very soon, I promise)

It'd be nice to have a way to search and embed uploaded NW images into our forum posts. Maybe a dynamic result box when you type in keywords. Then when you click a result it puts in the needed markup into your forum post.

Maybe this is a boring question, or one that you might not want to discuss publicly at the moment for whatever reason, but: How's the site doing financially at the moment? Like, does keeping it running cost more than you get back or is it staying afloat?

Honestly... not sure.

Somewhere early 2017 traffic fell hard almost overnight due to a code error that basically resulted in most of the site being not listed on Google anymore and I wasn't really paying attention to things day to day so this went on for months and months and months (until somewhere in late 2017?) before I noticed the problem. I fixed that a few months ago and things have risen a fair amount since then but still nowhere near the peak before the fall, the damage was done, probably will never get back to near we used to be on Google rankings, especially since there isn't much new content coming out nowadays.

I'd have to look at the numbers but roughly speaking the site costs about $100? a year to run? I think? and at the max it was bringing in maybe $500? a year but now it has to be much lower due to the above mentioned stuff.

Looking at Adsense it looks like for the last few months it's been like $3-5 bucks a month (back at the peak it was bringing in like $30 a month or more on average) so...

Realistically, probably not quite covering it at the moment? Though I'd have to check the two other sources of income, donations and Amazon affiliate stuff. I get a donation here and there, sometimes a big one, so maybe it is being covered?

Whatever the case whether the current situation will be the case longterm or not is hard to say since the "fix" to the above issue is relatively new, but it looks like we're kind of evening out now and will not be anywhere near the peaks before the issue so I'm guessing this is about the new norm. Hard to rebuild Google's trust in you I guess.

@Zero
Ah, I see. So I guess some extra donations wouldn't hurt then. Not that they ever would. Just thought I'd ask since you don't really bring this stuff up very often, I don't think, so I seldom think about the state of things. Wouldn't feel right if you put all that effort and time into the site only for it to end up in the red while we're hanging around, posting to our hearts' content.

Speaking of posting, it would be cool if we came up with something that could draw some amount of extra traffic to this place, but I haven't got much of an idea as to what that should be. Not that I've given it any thought. Perhaps we can come up with something that could ride the wake of something E3 related this summer.

I honestly find it tough to predict what kind of content here will go bigger. I can say what doesn't... the same stuff you find on bigger sites. So like, as much as a Zelda or Mario review is cool, it's not going to be that viral hit. But some Kris Wright thingy about some old music cd or something, that can go big. On the other hand my top 10 Metroid games thing got huge, though that doesn't feel super unique? Mostly because it got big on Reddit or something?! But maybe it is unique-ish?

Here is a link to the most viewed content on NW

The game discussion pages are probably mostly getting views from us, since they get a lot of traffic and posts here on the forum itself. But everything else is probably from Google and going viral-ish and the likes.

My basic plan is to try to create unique content, but then, I also just do whatever I feel like without worrying much about the numbers.

And lately I mostly just work on my game and ignore making new stuff for the site. Sorry, priorities!

@Zero
It's not like this place needs to compete with the big news sites or anything either, right? Maybe we could capitalize on the fact that there are so many indie devs here? Do some type of exclusive content related to that? Weird roundtables or interviews or something.

I had a few things that I wanted to do, but work tends to get in the way of me being creative these days. I hate adulting.