This originally started out as a PM to the mods but i see no reason why this shouldn't be a community post.
As a long time user of totse and subsequent spawn thereof I have grown very close to the spirit of these forums and its user base. In current days I see that this base has dwindled a bit. In a situation like this I tend to believe it is good to look at the statistics and luckily Arnox was intelligent enough to make them convenient to access. I will post them here for ease:
[th]Date[/th]
[th]Net topics[/th]
[th]New Posts [/th]
[th]New Members[/th]
|
| year | 405 | 2891 | 168 |
| august | 45 | 218 | 16 |
| july | 52 | 358 | 35 |
| june | 115 | 1090 | 32 |
| may | 193 | 1225 | 103 |
With this information I can see quite a few things. First off we were on a steep decline by the end of july. Second if the numbers keep pretty similar to the conditions we have right now by the end of the month I would bet our numbers for the month could be 100 new topics, 1000 posts and at least 30 new members (mind you most new members are a one and done deal).
Its been a lot of talk about these numbers and you are probably wondering where I am going with it all. I suppose I want to see those numbers increase. There are a few ways we can do this.
1. Get current members to post.
To be quite honest I feel like this forum is a conversation between me and like 5 other guys and generally we just shoot the shit. There are times one of us will say something intelligent but the whole group has difficulty staying with one subject. I am looking for ideas on a way to incentivise or encourage posting among users who were big posters on totse2 but don't post often enough on here. One thing I would like to see is older members and mods going through the forum looking for older threads that can be revived. I think a lot of threads have potential even if they are quite a few months old as long as you can get it spinning in the right direction. I don't mean necrobumping but actively searching for threads that, if given a push, could provide something of value. Also encourage and reward content.
2. Link up
If we really want more users and more conversation, collaboration and content it may be as easy as taking to twitter, blogs or even tumblr or facebook. We need to start marketing our self like a brand. If we had some users who were willing to set up some sort of committee for our use of social networking I'm sure we could expand this place very quickly as long as we market our self to the right types of people. We could even have some sort of news letter with how to's and interesting information if we had some people dedicated to such a job.
Anyone have any more ideas on how to improve our numbers? Lets discuss the ways we can get sanctuary to where we know it can be.
