shakran

Combining this with a politics board is just asking for trouble. A user-rating system is just too damn easy to abuse - look at Ebay's feedback mechanism if you want examples. I'd bet more than half of the negative feedback on there is from people seeking petty revenge rather than reporting the true facts about a transaction.

Halx, the trouble with the TFP is partly that it's on the internet. Internet hangouts come and go faster than any pre-net fad you've ever heard of. I bet few people here have thought of Geocities or telnet talkers in quite awhile, but not so very long ago they were THE place to be on the net. Geocities killed itself by being stupid, true enough, but the talkers were going strong until ICQ came along - - - now we have cute sound effects to go along with the chatting, and no more wizards to stop us from being assholes, so everyone migrated. Then ICQ got uncool because AIM came out (though why anything from AOL was ever accepted is still beyond me) even though they were essentially the same damn thing. But it's pretty hard to find someone with a UIN anymore. I'm amazed I still remember mine.

Myspace was booming, now everyone's off making the same damn pages on a different service. Why? It's the faddish nature of the net.

Frankly the only reason the TFP is visited anymore at all is because it's managed to attract people with higher intelligence than the average net.nimrod. We have longer attention spans, so we stick around.


I think this new forum of yours has interesting possibilities if you use it correctly. Frankly I think you should migrate all the porn over there and make TFP a pure discussion community. I'll tell you why.

Many of us here on TFP would love to invite our friends to join up, but we certainly can't be telling our coworkers and friends-who-might-not-understand to come to a site that has porn on it. It's a real good way to get fired or sued in today's puritanical world.

The way you used to attract people was by dangling the porno carrot in front of them. Hey come look at all the naked women. Oh and by the way now that you've looked at them for awhile if you want to KEEP looking at them, start talking or get deleted. You attracted a lot of people that way, many of whom became contributing members.

But now you have the porn locked off to new users - so you've cut out the, for want of a better phrase, marketing value of the porn. The porn hunters are going to go somewhere that they can get porn NOW, not in 2 weeks. And the people who are looking for a discussion community instead of the porn aren't going to come here because, hell, it's a bunch of damn porno freaks. The simple fact is, TFP's porn has become a liability if your goal is to attract new members.

Meanwhile you have the only forum on the net where real discussions can and do happen. Sure, people talk on other forums, but they rarely discuss. Either things move too freakin' fast (go visit the hard forum. If your post isn't replied to within about 2 minutes, it's already scrolled off the new post list and no one will see it), or they're overmoderated and therefore a ghost town, or they're undermoderated and therefore a haven for morons. TFP has largely managed to avoid all of this and in the process attract a core group of posters who are, in defiance of most internet trends, capable of having intelligent discussions. But it's difficult for that core group to grow if new blood isn't constantly coming in - - - hence the problem of the porn.

Now, if you moved the porn over to this new forum, I think you'd get a lot of people to be comfortable coming to TFP to check it out. It's no longer a porn forum, it's one of the oldest discussion communities on the internet and hey! It actually has smart people posting on it. That's a pretty attractive formula if you ask me.