Shauk

want my 2 cents?

get rid of the blogs. Make a blog forum, right now it feels like a segmented site and people do NOT visit the blogs nearly enough, discussion in there is sparse, hell, I don't even want to go look at other people's blog entries because it's just like the basement of TFP, it doesn't feel like part of the community to me. I'd suggest it be a forum much on the level of exhibition because what people write in there is much more intimate than a set of nipples or a wang. I'd love spending more time reading the goings on in the lives of other forumers but beyond hitting "new posts" or sharing the occasional interesting (to me) post of my own, the posters here have a hard time distinguishing themselves in my head as being personalities vs lifeless forum names.

elseways, I only need to offer the video vs print media debate. Forums as "communities" have felt like they've been in a decline for ages. This forum and one other are the only remaining 2 out of about 8 I used to frequent that have any traffic at all.

Incentivise discussion. Icons, badges, extra titles, whatever, you guys had this voting thing a while back and that fizzled because it was mostly a popularity contest I think.

and, I hate to say it but maybe you just need to re-merge the adult forums with this site.

Honestly though, my last suggestion is simply this. Building communities from the outside works a lot better than pressuring those who enjoy the environment on the inside.

I don't think people go to the bar with friends to have the bartender interrupt their good times to snark at them and tell them that they need to buy extra drinks or they're closing the bar to make up for the lack of business from others.


I dunno, you can dissect and rebutt this post and it's suggestions all you want, ultimately I'm just of the mindset that it's not really anything we can fix for you. As far as what I can tell from the donation counter, the site is still paying for itself.

But mostly, I agree on the point that if the stress is getting to you, or you feel you lack the time/desire/expertise to be a community leader/builder/promoter then get more help from people who are enabled to do so, find volunteers.

Simply put, TFP isn't what it once was, and what you guys tried to turn it in to, doesn't seem to be working if it results in threads like this. I'm not mocking the situation, I've just seen it happen before and instead of adapting, or as you put it, evolving, they just gave up and became graveyards for spammers and bots.

Another idea is assigning content generation via volunteering/voting in forum leaders of the focused forums.

Say for instance, people who are really in to gaming or writing game reviews could be invited to post those reviews in the gaming forum on a regular basis. People with a focus in music could write album reviews or various studio methods, or share interesting youtube videos they came across.

As long as they accompany the post with original commentary, I think it would really help in the long term.