The activity in the Forums seems to have gotten a bit better than what it was in 2013 and early 2014. However I feel as if it could still use some more activity.
The question is how should we go about changing it? Well, I don't have any ideas, but what do you guys think would make the Forums grow?
Hopefully this thread will be a bit successful, I have a feeling it'll fail in the first day but I tried.
This question keeps getting asked, but there is only one answer, and it's not an answer that anybody who actually likes these forums would like.
Drinking the blood of our enemies?
Basically all we can do is be good users by staying active so that when new members come by they want to stay. Of course you can tell friends and people about the site and maybe they will become active community members if they are into this.
More like a hundred community quests and a monthly forum high score table instead of lifetime so people believe they have a chance at number one every month and start some really pointless kind-of-spammy clan, hypothetical, what is your favorite, and versus threads with one-worded answers. There's a reason we really don't see much of those anymore. There's also a reason why TTICA is no longer as active as it used to be. They don't naturally exist without because everyone knows they're bottom tier fluff threads.
Monthly over lifetime scoreboard because with time, it became clear how much it took to take lifetime number one as a new user. Every new user wanted to be the new number one, but they never lasted because they had no interest in the community and you never see them ever again after they made their declaration to beat firetail. Monthly will continue to drive new users here and then the forum quality will go down and there will be more user disagreements to deal with. There's a reason why we don't see those anymore. You don't have users who are pretending they aren't doing it for the points.
Armor Games has more users now than it did back then and most of them are just here for the games. Sure the forums aren't as active, but most of that was artificially inflated by AP. When was the last time you saw a really active profile comment chat? Users can claim all they want that they weren't doing it for the points, but they sure left quickly when they were removed.
While I agree Gantic that your methods would be very efficient in bringing in more users, like you said it would kill the quality of the forums. I believe what most users would like is more users but not kill quality. While I believe this can be done, it is much harder than your version. We first have to get people to the forums, make them want to stay, and want to be a good member of the community. People like that are obviously out there but it is how we target those people to get them to come here without dragging in hoards of people that will spam.
Like I said before I believe the easiest and probably one of the more affective ways is to just remain active. What quality user would want to come to a forum that seems pretty dead. While we are small we need to remain active enough to attract new people that would otherwise go somewhere else.
A bomb. Clearly the fear would scatter everyone into the spiders, and then they would complain about the spiders. Unless there was some sort of government collapse, and people devolve into riots and that stuff.
And to ignore Gantic and daleks getting all philosophical about activity, I have no clue, and I'm not going to read that because my eyes are throbbing.
What could help is if I stopped procrastinating on making a bunch of threads. There are some I've been intending to make for one or two years but I just never got around to it ^.^
Anywho, an idea that I had (that I procrastinated on vocalizing during the last feeble attempt at an activity boost thread) is that we make new versions of old, popular threads. Everyone's talking about the fact that not only is activity low, thread quality isn't at it's peak either. So, one solution is to recreate old threads that were good, so long as they're still relevant and all that jazz.
I was thinking about that thread that was about urinating in the shower.
TMI, R2.
Anyway, I feel that the forums don't get as much promotion around the site as they should. We could promote the forums more by providing the links of the game thread to its game. That way, people who play those games and want help with them will click on the links, which will direct them to the thread and to the rest of the forums.
