The CF revival

[dude_se]

ive noticed that a lot of forums i go on are getting smaller and smaller. this could be for all kinds of reasons, but think theres so much competition out there that people dont have the time to post on more than 1, or simply dont have the time to post at all. so its all about keeping the current members happy so they dont wander off.

cf has always been a small community, but we used to survive by having a select few members posting on a daily basis, some heated arguments, and also some laughs. it kept things fresh and interesting and there was always someone around to welcome a newbie/help them. sadly a few people have left for whatever reason and the community seems to have died a little bit.

another problem i think was the old owners (dave) lack of willing to improve the site. he would keep it running as best he could and listen to what we had to say dont get me wrong, but no massive improvements were ever put in place. it took many years to get custom avatars for example, which is pretty standard on all sites these days. i think if he would have kept with the times and kept the site fresh and exciting with a new theme, logo, new vb, and a blog or anything like that then more of the newbies would have stuck around. it just got to the point where the site looked outdated and cluttered, and it didnt help when the server kept crashing/was slow.

theres never an easy way to revive a forum, but luckily this one has a great domain name, and has enough members to draw up some interest on facebook, which i think is a good idea btw. the "like" thing would work really well. allso the mass email thing. its free and wont hurt.

i stopped full time posting from this site for many reasons. mainly due to being busy and because my interest in computers started to decrease as my life became more problematic. also, and i know this sounds petty, but i felt a bit overwhelmed by the amount of american people on here. i know that sounds terrible but i dont mean it in a bad way. i just felt sometimes that i didnt have a lot in common with them, as any computer advice they offer would be tailored to their country (where to buy computer parts from in america, and based in dollars, etc, so obviously little help to me), and i could never really talk about going to a certain place, etc, as no one would know where it was or wtf i was on about i also just generally felt like i wasnt always part of the community/people even knew who i was. another issue was the time difference. not that many english people meant there were times when i was lurking the forum by myself/with a few others. made it quite boring waiting a day for replies. so for all these reasons i just started to post less and less, and now it feels like a different place with new people, so sadly i have moved on. i may post full time again who knows, but my point is even people like me who have strayed may come back, so its important to make it a decent site to be on, so if they do check back in they will stay, and right now its a ghost town, not making me want to stay tbh.

im still very shocked though at the lack of decent computer forums out there, not that ive really been looking, but ive just not come across many on my travels, which i find strange, considering they are taking over the world lol.

 

[berry120]

I think a lot of it (in general) is also because of the rise of SO - 5 years ago people headed to forums for advice when they had questions, but these days with StackOverflow, Superuser et al. so big that's where they tend to go. Which makes sense in and of itself, it's a much better model for answering questions with good answers IMO than a forum.

However, the traditional forums are much better at building a community of people... perhaps that's what should be focused on a bit more.

 

[IAntDemo]

i think someone said it all: add more threads, keep people talking, it brings a massive amount of people active and more members.

that's all that needs to be done, nothing else, absolutely nothing

 

[berry120]

that's all that needs to be done, nothing else, absolutely nothing

I disagree that nothing else needs to be done - personally I think it's that kind of thought process that's landed us here in the first place (not keeping the site updated both from a visual and security perspective, having lots of changed owners...)

Adding more threads and keeping people talking is all well and good, but that's best accomplished alongside other things to drive more people to the site in the first place, who will then add more threads and start the process you describe. You've also got the problem that lots of threads started from the same core group of people looks artificial, like we're trying to show there's more activity than there actually is..

 

[lhuser]

At this moment, I'm alone.

There used to be a time when we'd gather up and play some games, but unfortunately that died, and I don't think we have financial stability for prizes, but if we could pull out events and activities like before (Online Gaming, Podcasts), we'd be off to a greater start, but if we could get the Google Ads back, that could generate revenue and over time, we could get the finance to bring out small prizes and as the activity picks up, we could go for a bit bigger prizes.

That could bring it up a bit, and once we have some activities up, then we could send that mass-email out and tell that we have quite a bit of stuff going on and we'd like them to join in as well.

An integrated chat feature is out of the question; it won't work well and barely works anyways.

I've also checked out popular forums (and a few that I got kicked out when I was a young teenager (Freakin' teenage years...hated 'em)) and they have their home made software (Like we had as well), some have a less complicated forum layout than ours (Where I can agree, Security forums and Software could be merged at least).

We also have guides (Mostly outdated too) all over the place, where they could be all brought into a special section of theirs, updated to 2012 (not 2005-2007) and maintained, as well as having them easy for the illiterate, because not all of us are geeks either. That's why it's a forum too.

Having our own home made software, constantly updating guides, as well as making new ones, having a CF dedicated gaming area where all of the gaming freaks could get in (I play sometimes WoW and I don't think Knetwalk and Kpatience is an online game), having podcasts and with through the revenue of ads (and maybe further on, donations), then we could have quite some variety for new people.

Gallery section should also have its own corner instead of a sub-forum.

When activity picks up more, we might need mods, and I saw that some forums offer users to apply for mod status, providing you meet the minimal requirements.


All this also requires the users to have the will of giving a bit of their time to CF as well. I'm willing, even when the job will pick up.

My view of things would look like this:

Guides -> 1-2 maintainers for now
Podcasts > 1-2 hosts and a few more depending on their will to join or not for the session
Gaming -> Constantly hosting and CF gaming nights
Prizes -> When possible, start small then grow bigger, to a certain limit
Gallery -> Own special section

Signatures...people requesting images...despite people in the majority here do not want them, we could set up a CF signature banner that people could type their stuff up and then it would generate a CF banner, making it a bit more neater than all those images we find in other forums.



I have probably been repetitive, but all this was written on the fly for the most part.
You want activity? Well, it'd be best to bring these ideas up, at least a few at a time. After a few of them up, bring that mass-email to all the registered users. Who knows?

 

[dude_se]

meh signatures dont bother me, as long as a certain size limit was put in place. if anything it would add a bit of colour to the forum.

 

[01001010]

Many reasons why this site went down. The last owner was completely incompetent, for one.

 

[setishock]

The facebook setup comes built in to VB. All they have to do is get the facebook account set up and get the keys. I had facebook turned on at my place but since I was clicking the like button on my own posts it didn't seem fair for some reason. I turned it off.
But I do advertise my gallery and forum on my personal FB account. Let me tell ya it gets results. I got 6000 hits on my gallery in 2 hours after posting the gallery link and a lot and I mean a lot of hits still come from courious facebookers.

 

[iPwn]

Like Button Idea:
When JCB updated to VB 4.0 we did have the like buttons. They were then removed because a few members started to complain that they made the forum too cluttered. (??) I always liked the idea of the Facebook integration myself.

Mass Emails:
JCB set this one in motion a while back as well. When he enabled it though, he had it set to resend the message every X days/weeks while a user had not logged in for Y days. We had many people log back in just to change their email address on file or request their account be permanently deleted. It did, however, bring in some return traffic for us. I think it might be a good idea as long as we don't send the message in an infinite loop

 

[Janet H]

We will send out a "come on back" e-mail in the next few weeks. Really what we need is time for the board to grow again. It's been through a lot and with the hacks you had to really want to log in. For a prospective member with a tech issue this was insurmountable, imo.

Keep the faith, help out newbies, be friendly and have fun - we'll get there.