Pointless would be the word. Yeah it is a shame, we need some new blood bad. I miss the days of heated discussions and normal discussions about all manner of things. We need to find a way to bring new members here.
I don't want this place to die, but apathy and a lack of new members is killing it. It's hard to keep a forum going when only 3 or 4 people actually post anything.
I think it just needs some time and for us to start getting new people in via a main site or articles. I guess featuring in web searches is when we'll start getting new people. I think it was a DS VS PSP sales thread that got me here. I'll be around more in a few weeks or so, then I'll be able to chip in more. Been very busy recently, unfortunately.
We're on (essentially) free hosting and have the domain for a year. It's not like this place will just suddenly shut down tomorrow or something. But it is on life support at this point, and if things keep going like this there may be no point in renewing the domain next year.
Ichiban was working on it. I'm not sure how far along it is or if he's even working on it anymore. I think he got busy with work and/or became apathetic like everyone else. He hasn't posted much on the forums in awhile. This place only has like five active members right now. We might be better off moving over to Gamespot eventually and just setting up a PVC union or something like that. It's been two months, and I think if this place was going to catch on it would have caught on by now. The main site is a nice idea, but none of us are video game journalists with insider connections or anything, so I just don't see it being a big draw for new people.
It's going to be slow to catch on when we're relying purely on lucky google searches. Give 'em somewhere to read interesting stuff and it's more likely people will stick around.
Google searches brought us a few random spammers and that's it. Part of the problem is that the site doesn't feature prominently in google searches, whereas the old site would be one of the first things to come up in a lot of searches.
I am starting to think maybe articles, news and blogs may be a better approach than reviews. We only have a handful of us to do reviews and we will not be able to cover most of sections. Besides, it takes hard work to get lots of members, so we must preserve and work hard on a main site so that people will come. Gamespot? It's a messy forum isn't it?
I'm in no way apathetic, I've just got shit loads of work on my plate; someone I worked with has quit so I've now got twice the work load on my plate. I think come the end of the month I'll be much more free with my time so I can get back to doing some of the web front end/advertising stuff. I think part of the problem is we're not making enough threads with "punchy" titles for Google to crawl. Think about some of the things someone might google and that's the sort of titles we need our good posters to be putting up. Literally spam the shit out of this place guys because theres a tonne of bandwidth not being used each month and I really don't care how argumentative some might be; obviously don't take it too far though. I'm contemplating going "freelance" soon; maybe even banding together with a couple of other people to go indie so I'll definately have time on my hands then. However, if anyone has got some real expertise in web design or familiarity with CMS's like Drupal or Joomla and fancies trying their hands at the design of the front end site then drop me a message. Oh and if anyone has an idea for an iPhone or Android game let me have it!! BTW, you may have noticed the spammers haven't been around in a while; I set up an impressive plug-in which just spots spammers a mile off. Seems to be working. I think this place is doing OK. There's certainly more than just five of us posting and the post count is pretty healthy. Let's stick with it, god forgive me for using a business buzz slogan but "Rome wasn't built in a day"..etc..
Hah, I stated that before to Monkey when he first went Emo about this forum dying. We will eventually get it, you cannot expect something to be amazing after such a short time. I still think we should change the main site to something other than reviews though.
I was using my flatmates Iphone earlier to do something. He must have forgot something as when I pressed a button to get it off sleep there was a picture of his missus with her tits out. Mwahah!