Here's some data that might be helpful for the discussion.
This is a graph of visits of the website (excluding forums) over time:
Here is the same graph for the forums:
(ignore the first and last months being off, that's because it truncates the months)
As you can see, there has been a steady decline in views over the years.
Since our goal is to investigate why the forums are "dying", we should try to find out what the REAL problem is. Note that the decreased popularity of the forums correlate with the amount of views the site gets in general. My guess is that the visits on the website are almost directly correlated with the popularity of SM63. Games like Last Legacy dwarf in comparison to the amount of views a Mario game brings in. So the reduction in activity in the forums is likely to be because I haven't made a popular game recently.
As for ideas to make the forums more active. We need to see through the eyes of newcomers and find out why or why not they are staying.
I'll try to summarize the reason why a user will be at the site and what they would be interested in doing.
A user may be at the site for the following reasons:
- Redirected from SM63 / Last Legacy:
Potential interests:
- Participating in the portal (voting for, and submitting levels)
Possible outcomes:
- Makes an account to post levels, but never posts on forums. (note that since the user is required to post before they can submit a level, this is a serious problem)
- Forums are too complicated/too much of a commitment. Never posts their level.
Possible reasons:
- Takes too many clicks to create an account and authenticate it and then learn how to use the form to submit a level.
- Users doesn't feel like being social (but still wanted to share level).
- Users are required to post in the welcome topic. Could be too much work, or a barrier for non-native english speakers.
- Makes account, posts levels, also participates in the forums.
- To play more games like it
Possible outcomes:
- Goes to forums to read about game (guides, glitches, ect)
- Goes to forums to talk about game (be a fan, speculation, glitches, suggestions, criticism, ect.)
- Never visits the forums.
- Joining the forums
- Can't get past anti-bot measures. (This could very well be possible)
- Was a member a long time ago, can't remember username/password and has to re-reg only to be perma-banned.
- Lurks and doesn't see anything he/she is interested in.
Possible reasons:
- Site's graphics or organization aren't good/clear enough
- Users on the site bully new members
- Forums are too inactive
- Told about the site from a friend
Potential interests:
- Playing games
Possible outcomes:
- Likes the games (see above section "Redirected from SM63 / Last Legacy")
- Playing friend's level
Possible outcomes:
- "Eww forums". Visitor leaves. (Solution would be to make a level page that is on the site and not the forums)
- User plays level, but is not able to vote without an account and is not interested in making an account.
- User makes an account just to vote. Becomes inactive because they don't want to post in welcome topic.
- User is genuinely interested in forums and joins forums.
- Joining forums
- Is a bot
Potential interests:
- Crawling (not exactly harmful)
- Creating accounts (thousands of accounts!!)
- Posting junk (almost always taken care of my mods)
Things like having LDCs more often and putting up Minecraft/TF2 servers won't really help with the activity of the forums because the number of people that participate in those are a small fraction of the already small amount of active users.
There are a number of things I would like to do to improve the experience for new members on the site. One of them is to remove the requirement of an account on the forums to participate in the level designer. This goes for the portal
and even level designer contests. I realize that the reason why you need an account is for anti-bot measures. But bots can be stopped in other ways too. The next thing I would like to do is fix the forum's graphics. The forum's graphics are outdated and contrast the rest of the website a lot (and the buttons in the header sometimes don't even work!). I made a post about updating the graphics with a mock-up I made, but I never have the time to get around to it. If there were any members interested in helping out there it would be great. The next improvement I'd like to see is to re-organize the forum sections. It's outdated and confusing to navigate. I often times mess up trying to find a section like the Last Legacy user submitted levels VS the level portal. And as mentioned earlier, a section for GT and the Smash Bros engine isn't really needed.
Some ideas I had for bringing in more users to the site was to start up a YouTube channel with WiTBLoaT featured videos as well as videos of the LDC results or even videos like developer commentary or even let's plays. If anyone wants to get those kind of things going they should contact me.
