Community Interview: Moonface from Universal Gaming

Some of you may have seen him around, Adam aka @Moonface is a very down to earth guy, I love him and I'm sure you'll all enjoy reading this interview about him and Universal Gaming


Q: Hello! Thank you for accepting my interview request. Can you tell me and the community more about yourself? Who are you, what's your age, gender, where are you from?
A: Hi everyone! I go by the username Moonface (he/him), and I'm 32 years old. I've always gone by that username since I started using forums in 2004, so if you've seen it before you probably have at least some idea of who I am; although, I could have been known as Adam during my time as staff on the ZetaBoards Support Forum but I refused to join the RealName™ movement. As for where I'm from, I spent most of my life in a small little town in England but I currently reside in Florida, which I moved to in 2017. My hometown isn't really notable or super well-known even within the country, but it does have the accolades of having an area of residential streets all named after "Lord of the Rings" (i.e. Gandalf's Ride, Hobbiton Hill, plus 23 more), as well as being the place where a couple were successful in starting and promoting a movement against the X Factor obtaining the Christmas #1 in 2009 by encouraging people to purchase "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine. XD

Q: What is your greatest strength being a webmaster?
A: I don't really give much thought to this one so I had to take a moment here. I'd say it would probably be commitment, since my forum has been restarted two times in its 16+ year tenure, once in 2008 after a moderator caused enough damage that the community collectively agreed it was best to have a fresh start, and again in 2018 when ZetaBoards was converted to Tapatalk, which I don't think anyone who had a forum on that service at that time wanted any part of. There were also multiple other gaming boards on ZetaBoards that saw more success than mine did in regards to activity and membership, but I never allowed myself to be discouraged by that and focused on just doing the best I could to provide a community my members could enjoy. ^_^

Q: What is your greatest accomplishment?
A: Probably my move to Florida in 2017. I was 27 at the time and the idea of moving to another country to live was an incredibly stressful and daunting experience that required almost two years of time collectively spent between myself and my now-wife on paperwork and other legal things that were necessary for the move to happen. Not only was I moving countries, but this was also the time I moved out from living with my parents. It's funny looking back on it all because once it was all said-and-done, it felt like such a small thing. XD

Q: How long have you been on forums in general? What's the history behind you?
A: The first forum I ever joined was in 2004 on the InvisionFree platform, and it was a place called WCF: Wrestling Cover Forum. I came across it after a cover designer I followed stopped posting their custom WWE PPV covers on their personal blog, so I had to find somewhere else to find covers to print for PPV events I recorded and needed VHS/DVD sleeves for, and WCF was the place I found. I had intended to register with my real first name, but Adam is a very common name so naturally it was already taken, thus I had to come up with something else. Whilst I was trying to come up with a username, I overheard my dad say the term "moonface" and liked the sound of it; later I found out what I had overheard him talking about was a medical condition his mother had suffered from. My best friend and I made our forum on the same platform in 2006, but I didn't really branch out to other forums until about 2007/2008 and when I did all of them were within the InvisionFree/ZetaBoards network.

Q: What's the most successful forum you ever owned?
A: My current forum, Universal Gaming, which my best friend and I started in October 2006. I did one time try my hand at running a graphics forum in like 2007, but I didn't stick to it for very long.

Q: What has inspired you to start your forum?
A: I wasn't the one to actually start Universal Gaming; that action was taken by my best friend who asked me if I wanted to help make the graphics for the board as co-admin when he first made the board. Back then I intended only to really be designing any graphics that were needed and letting him do any of the other forum stuff, but as time went on I gradually branched out to doing other things out of curiosity and I enjoyed all the other tasks a co-admin could do, so just kept doing them. LOL

Q: Can you tell us more about the software your site is running and why you have chosen that software?
A: Universal Gaming is currently running on MyBB, and the main reason for that is our sudden move to a self-hosted forum due to the closure of ZetaBoards. I didn't have a lot of time to look at the options available for self-hosted forum software because I wanted to get the forum moved before E3 2018 started, but I at least knew I didn't want to use any paid software because of the cost involved, and of the free choices I only had time to look at Jcink and MyBB. I ultimately went with the latter because as a software it looked more appealing, plus I didn't feel comfortable using Jcink because it isn't self-hosted and didn't want the potential headache of moving again (with or without the database) if that service ever closed down.

Q: Where do you see your forum heading in a couple of years? What are your goals?
A: I don't try to focus too much on a goal for my forum in terms of growth mostly for my own sanity and mental health, plus we've always been a rather small community and I prefer to appreciate what I have rather than lament about or focus on what I don't. Generally I try to just make sure that my forum continues to be a place people can enjoy themselves on and I appreciate everyone who chooses to spend whatever amount of time they wish as part of my community. Smile

Q: How often do you work on your forum, creating new content, adding news, doing back-end stuff?
A: I don't tend to touch the back-end stuff too often mostly through lack of any need to. I'll check out plugins every so often just to see if there's anything new I could add that my community could benefit from, but most of the back-end stuff I do is probably software updates. Most of my time is spent trying to share any gaming news that my community will take interest in, making new threads, and maintaining a regular schedule of rotating contests throughout the year to give everyone something to participate in without those contests feeling repetitive by having the same one happen back-to-back.

Q: Do you consider yourself an expert webmaster? Are there aspects that you'd like to know better?
A: If by expert you mean someone who knows all the intricate workings of servers and databases and stuff, then absolutely not. Unless something isn't working right, I try not to touch it ever since I unintentionally deleted my entire MyBB forum by mistake just after it started and was very fortunate that my host had a rollback option for me to easily undo the damage without much trouble. I would like to know how all the more complex things work better, just for the confidence and peace of mind about it even if it wouldn't result in me doing more with that stuff than I do now. Ignoring all the intricate pieces and looking at just the stuff like running a forum and all that, I still don't know if I'd say I'm an expert but I at least like to think I try to do the best I can for my community.

Q: Do you like to have each detail set-up the way you want it and have everything go perfect? Or are you more laid back and fix a couple settings and let things fall into place on their own?
A: I do like having things be set-up as close as I can to what I want it to be, partly from wanting things to be as good as they can be but also because if I do a task as fully as possible the first time it means I don't have to worry about remembering to work on it more later, especially when I have an awful time remembering tasks I have to do whether it be online or offline. However, there are things from when I first started the MyBB version of Universal Gaming that I would like to revisit, such as the default theme in regards to its coding, because a lot of things I did at that time were rushed to get the forum open before E3 2018 started and I also had no idea how long it was going to be before ZetaBoards converted all its forums to Tapatalk.

Q: Do you pick staff according to their popularity on forums, or their personality?
A: A mixture of both really, although the staff lineup hasn't had to change since 2008. Usually I found if someone was well-liked on the forum, they had a personality and attitude that was fitting for being a member of staff. Fortunately, the most my co-admin and moderator have to worry about really is getting rid of any spammer that joins the forum since problems between or with members is a rare occurrence. Smile

Q: How do you advertise?
A: Most of the advertising I do is either in my signature on other forums or affiliation, but I do also try to promote the forum on promotional forums. We do have a Twitter account too, but the success of that rides a lot on luck with the algorithm and such when it comes to tweet exposure but I know a couple of my members find it useful to see off-site notices about new contests and whatnot.

Q: How do you maintain your traffic/income and keep members entertained?
A: My forum doesn't generate any income since we don't run ads, and if there ever came a time where I needed help with running costs I would try to find ways that don't involve running ads if I could because they're not exactly popular. For entertaining my members, as I mentioned earlier I try to maintain a rotation of staple contests throughout the year so none feel too repetitive, and I also run larger events during the year for Summer and Halloween/Anniversary as well as looking out for opportunities to run unique contests or events centered around the launch of a particular game. For examples on that last point, I've done a scavenger hunt themed around finding the iconic crystals from Crash Bandicoot during the launch of the N. Sane Trilogy, or a dress up Cloud contest as a nod to the cross-dressing sequence in Final Fantasy 7 when the remake was coming out. XD