GTC
cupcake
For the past few years I'd check in on the board once every three or four months and see that threads I had looked at months ago were still on the front page. I had never seen the board be so quiet and lifeless. The raw numbers you posted confirm those feelings.What do the rest of you think about this?
The board is a pale shadow in comparison to it's golden age of 2005/2006. We didn't just have more posters and active threads at the time. We had a lot of board culture content as well. The radio broadcasts, TK House, Ouch! (why is that link even in the navbar btw?), original fiction, and other related things.
I'm not saying we need to bring all those things back. But it does highlight part of what has changed over the years.
The staff aren't required to do anything other than enforce the lax rules that are in place. How they choose to participate in the board is up to them.What could the staff do to make this place better?
Forget the Minefield. They're their own little ethnic enclave in TK, and I doubt they give a shit what goes on in the rest of the board as long as it doesn't affect them.This is gonna get me some flak, but a good 70% of what gets posted down in the MF could be parsed into the upper, on-topic forums, instead of having one giant forum.
I would however encourage everyone else to poke a little more into the Media Center.
Historically those forums did have their own atmosphere. Speak Freely was the trollish off-topic area. The Tea Room was more relaxed and was home to those spammy forum games that women seem to like. The Badlands ended up being a substitute for what the Minefields original intent was, and housed our nonsense spam.Also, we currently have four off-topic forums: MF, BL, TR, and SF. We could just merge the BL, TR, and SF, because they all have the same users anyway. So, keep the MF as a troll-free off-topic forum and unite the other three under a new name and banner.
Personally I think there's quite a few lurkers out there who would start posting if discussion on the board did pick up again. I don't believe we need to make any drastic changes to bring them in. All we need to do is post more.