Update: here is the list of our 10 winners, thanks again to everyone who participated!

Jeannie #180
Brenda #273
CarolsBooks #210
Frank #145
Janet/Jeanetta64 #163
Gladys #190
Chelle #96
Kathy #28
Amie #52
Kat F. #207

I dont think we need a forum for social network. When you want your socials contact you can chat with a lot of friends on pogo or people you like. It depends on what they want with a forum, what subjects they want to discuss and what they want to do with it. Would it be more information for the players or not?

I think they can better concentrate on the games and find out new games, thats what pogo makes great. When they want a forum they must know what they want to discuss and they need a lot of moderaters to, just to check its aloud what people are talking about. I think they better can spend theire time, its timewasting, thats my opinion.

What we need we have here on this site, tips and tricks for the games and the answers for Trivial and Crossword Cove isnt it?

So Lura go on with your great site, you are doing a very great job and I want you to know that I have send a lot of people to this site, because it is the greatest site to find tip and tricks and also to find the free tokens.

The first thing I do every day is checking out this site, so I dont miss anything.

Greetings and a very big hug for Lura ;-) she deserve it

Also like others, I have serious doubts as to whether Pogo could maintain control over the forums. With the number of people on Pogo, if even a fraction participated in the forums, it could easily turn into nothing but negative comments and flame wars. The only way for Pogo to avoid that would be to moderate all comments and if they have the staff to moderate all comments, in my opinion they should be spending the time and money on games instead.

Personally I come to Pogo for the games and like many others I am frustrated by Pogo’s attempts to make it more of a social networking site.

That said, I love your blog Lura, it perfectly suits my needs. All the new information is released in a nice chronological order. So I can easily check every morning and sometimes during the day for what is new.

Since comments are attached to the post, I can look at comments for tips, ideas, thoughts, etc when I’m interested in them or skip over them if I’m not. I much prefer this type of format. A good example is the weekly badge comments, if I have a good tip to leave on the game or need some help, it’s easy to access the information for that weeks game only. Unlike the forums which would have all the tips, ideas, thoughts, etc, for all weekly badges since the thread started.

Like I said, personally I would not have the time, energy or desire to follow a forum.

So thank you again Lura for this blog, which truly does enhance my Pogo experience and your great minis on the weekend open thread which always make me smile or laugh.

Abigail

Another pet peeve that runs this thread: game glitches. After (presumable) in – house testing AND end user sampling beta testers (who again presumably are not inept and bring glitches to pogos attention) it SHOULD be pogos responsibility to fix all games before release…but it doesnt happen. WHY recruit beta testers at all?

Just some random musings from a casual passerby.

From the standpoint of a fan site owner, I’m kind of excited about the possibility of Pogo forums. I look forward to those slow news weeks where I can go scour the Pogo forums to find new things to post about for you guys. (I do this all the time for my Big Sea Games fan site and it’s worked out well.) It’ll give me an even better idea of the ‘pulse’ of Pogo and current events, plus I know I can save some time for those of you who won’t be willing to wade through the crazy on the forums for the important news and information.

Someone mentioned they were excited to be able to share this site with other users on the forums. I’d be honored if our visitors could share this site with even more people, but it’s unlikely that Pogo would allow links to outside web sites on their forums — most corporate forums do not allow it, and heck, some other Pogo fan sites/forums won’t allow it either. As it is, word-of-mouth (I assume in chat rooms, emails, Pogo mails, et cetera) drives the majority of people to this site, followed then by search engine queries and direct links from other web sites.

From the standpoint of a fan, meh.. I would be interested to see how Pogo sets them up and how they use the forums to not just drive revenue but also to keep their players interested in participating and reading. I probably won’t participate (it’d be too tempting to give out my site’s url, heh), but for the reason I stated above I will probably read them more than most users. I’ve seen what’s happened at the Big Sea Games forums and that site is only allowing a limited set of users for beta testing now. Let’s just say the sheer number of complaints and frustrated posts far outweighs and makes it very difficult to find any important information there — and their moderators are absolutely on the ball.

I think we can probably guesstimate how the Pogo forums will work out by taking a look at EA’s forums (ghost-town for the majority of the boards, imo) and by looking at the quality and type of responses that they get to their Facebook status messages (off-topic, people trolling for free passes, and asking questions instead of using Help or reading the news).

I do not envy the person or people whose job it’ll be to moderate the forums. It will be a full-time job and then some! Trust me, I’ve got the unique viewpoint of seeing ALL comments and ALL email that comes into this site, and I have only a small share of Pogo’s fan base visiting here on a regular basis. Not only will they be policing the forum posts to avoid ‘unauthorized content’ — and they *will* edit your posts as they feel necessary — they’ll have to break up fights, answer the same questions over and over and over again, and find ways to make sure that people who are seeking information get it. (Oh, and to those of you saying Pogo should hire me for such a job: they couldn’t possibly afford me. :P)

It’s tempting to say “Pogo should focus on games and nothing else” but that’s probably unrealistic. Any people they may assign or hire to moderating and maintaining forums will not be people whose skillset would enable them to create new games. Yes, there’s budgetary matters involved, but the casual gaming industry is seeing a bit of a boom despite these ‘hard economic times’, it’s a growth period for sure. I honestly believe that Pogo always has and always will — guestbooks or forums or crazy pipe-dreams aside — focus mainly on the creation of great games.