Meta-discussion: what are our issues and how do we better structure solutions?

I think a lot of SONMers, quite fairly, saw it as a good point to move on from a community they had already outgrown or become less active with. The same happened with the transition from ONM to SONM itself. I think a lot of people are happy the community still lives on even if they are no longer active in it, as a kind of nice to know about legacy thing.

As I said before the gradual loss of members from a forum is inevitable for various reasons, so unless we can attract new members it will always be in a state of managed decline. That's not a poor reflection on anything or anyone, it's just the natural state of being.

Nun wrote:.

As someone who is into forum games and Mafia especially, do you have any suggestions as to how and where from we can attract new members through forum games?

Aside from one all of the SONM folks that made the transition have been welcome additions to the forum and it's a great shame that some of them appear have fallen away, but that's life innit. There's every chance they might come back later in time.

Even our forum games are, to be brutally honest, slowing down a lot. Our first AYA?s had 90 players and for years you'd easily get 60 or more -- now you'd be running a forum-wide marketing campaign for weeks to get 30.

But that's OK. It's not "worse", it's just different. The way the player-base has changed encourages innovation, you have to make tighter experiences, or more interesting ones that can keep people's interest even though they're busier.

I can't say I've ever really seen much politics talk outside of the dedicated threads, but it seems to be a big issue for some. Should it simply be banned outside of the relevant threads, or is that unmanageable?

Drumstick wrote:Aside from one all of the SONM folks that made the transition have been welcome additions to the forum and it's a great shame that some of them appear have fallen away, but that's life innit. There's every chance they might come back later in time.

Yeah definitely, and i'm not saying the the SONM membership dissapeared to criticize or claim it was anyones fault. I'm just saying what I see and pointing out that it's hard to integrate two communities in this way and had it been the other way around i'm sure that there would have been similar problems. ONM had Bronm, QQonm, Legion, Pseudo and all sorts of offsite chats knocking around with injokes and references that were alien to the casual forum users and were probably partially responsible for lowering forum activity as we all just kept in contact with those we got on with best elsewhere. It's hard to balance being a tightknit community and being welcoming to others but forum games and other community events could be useful as icebreakers to get people chatting and talking to eachother outside of political arguements.

I also do agree with what OR said, that with every major transition of ONM we lost more than a few members along the way and I know that I had sort of decided to tone down my online presence a lot to focus on the IRL stuff, which was definitely a good thing for me in the long run and i'm sure many others felt similarly. I have had a bit more time recently though so maybe I could run something but it'd really be competing with things like DMing my home D&D game which I think scratches the same itch that creating and running forum games used to for me.

One thing I like about discourse is that each week by default members are sent a digest of the active threads. I feel like this would keep lurkers involved and maybe even prompt them to post in threads they might have missed.

I like this idea, I know a good few of us take breaks from time to time, so it would be nice to come back to a "heres what you missed" segment

Winckle wrote:One thing I like about discourse is that each week by default members are sent a digest of the active threads. I feel like this would keep lurkers involved and maybe even prompt them to post in threads they might have missed.

You can specifically send emails to users who haven't logged in in X amount of time too.

Overall it looks like it could really help engagement. Things like browser notifications and live thread updates keep people on the site and coming back more. Then you have 3rd party sign ins which makes it easy to get new users - when I test Google sign in, I had an account up and running in less than 30 seconds any with very little input.

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That does all sound good. We had the idea for sending a regular e-mail out to everyone with some kind of digest but.. it would be a lot easier if that was automated based on top 10 replies/views etc

Apologies if this is the wrong place to put this suggestion or if these things have already been suggested / discussed.

Anyone new to the board would see our front page and might get the impression we're not that active. We all know what the symbols mean and where to look, but to a total newbie that doesn't apply. Social media displays prominent or 'trending' posts, topics etc very visibly and if it's possible, it'd be good to restructure the home page to better convey that activity.

What about if, instead of only showing the thread in which the most recent post was made and its poster under every sub forum, it showed let's say three currently very active topics under the heading 'popular discussions now' or similar?

I also think the weighting of our structure could do with reconsidering - I know the move to just Games and Stuff was popular for people already using our site but it makes us look small (especially as there are more "extra" folders than "main" ones). Perhaps we could look at how to split these out - and perhaps this could be used to allow for more straightforward moderation and rule understand in the future e.g. Stuff could become Chat and Discussion, and more serious threads could go in the latter and have stricter guidelines; we could differentiate between a folder for general games chat (Sounds familiar!) And wider "gamer culture" (Sorry for using this term) discussions- I'm thinking of the recent threads that have sparked controversy and been split apart - these might fit more comfortably within these seperate folders.

Re: larger "trending posts": Yeah, that's a good idea! Agreed 100%.

Re: subcategories: the problem with "more subforums" is that (sad to say it) we barely have enough activity for two subforums at the moment. It's Friday today, and the bottom of the first page of Stuff are threads last posted in on Monday. Games is even worse, it goes back to Sunday. Nothing says "dead community, not worth joining" to potential newbies like being able to see last week's chat on the main listing and that would be even worse the more boards we add. I think tags & filters would be a better way to achieve what you're suggesting.

Tags are definitely the solution used by most successful forums these days.

We already have tags though and folk don't use them... maybe it's cynical but perhaps we could display fewer topics on each page, and similarly 'pad' the space between them (possibly by displaying the first line of the most recent post underneath the topic title)?

The other option is that tags could be applied by others, not just thread creators.

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One issue with that is there is a bug where tags don't work the first time when creating thread, but they do editing it a 2nd time. Most people don't know about that :slol:

, and so one of those small jobs nobody knows happens is I add them in to threads habitually.

I think there is a "thread preview" feature already in phpBB I can check. We could have a little more padding.. But there is a strong view that we should optimise screen space as much as possible because our core userbase is pretty old school.

Anyone being able to tag a thread is a good idea.

THE ONLY TRUE GAMER wrote:
I also think the weighting of our structure could do with reconsidering...

I know this has kind of already been decided against but I still wanted to better articulate the kind of thing I had in mind.

So currently we have

DISCUSSION
Games
Stuff

COMMUNITY
CoA
Feedback
Trading Post
Archive

But I was thinking a structure more like:

GAMES
Software (threads for individual games)
Culture (other gaming topics)
Create (GRView, user generated content, forum games)

STUFF
Chat (fun, light hearted threads, comedy content, ents & sport)
Discussion (news, politics, more strictly moderated)
Trading Post

FORUM
Feedback & Rules
CoA
Archive

Siloing conversation would kill it even more. Forums need opening up not closing off.

Personally those groups would make great top level tags.

Id have 2 folders at most one for all threads and an archive, there would 2 tag tiers, those you specified as top level one set centrally and an dynamic second tier tag that is typed in and can be whatever the creator wants. You would type and it would show existing tags to assign or allow you to make one.

That way you can see set of threads using top level tags, and also find more specific stuff using 2nd tier tags or combining them.

It's probably not doable in phpbb however, so yeah.

Meta-discussion: what are our issues and how do we better structure solutions?

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