Is it just me??

[Xyandar]

Is it just me or has the population of this site went down the past while? i admit i havent been on it lately because ive been busy with life but Im used to posting 3 or 4 threads and expecting 5-10 responses in a couple hours lol. I dunno it could just be a slow few night but ive been bored and I think we gotta make this site known more so theres alot of people like there used to be :)

[GANTZ]

How do you propose we market it? Just tell
our friends?

[Sara]

[font=trebuchet ms]I think part of the "quiet" feeling (at least in the lounge) is due to PRP, because people who feel like chatting about something simply post there instead of starting a new thread. It means fewer threads in the lounge, and conversations in PRP frequently get lost and forgotten.

[quote name='takoyuki']How do you propose we market it? Just tell
our friends?[/QUOTE]I've actually been thinking about this a bit, and I have a couple ideas, if others are interested in helping.

How would people here feel about orchestrating some kind of "membership drive"?

My thought process is basically this: activity on this board goes through phases. It kind of always has. (When there's less going on, people come by less frequently and post less often, leading to even lower levels of activity. It works the other way around, too.) But right now, it seem that the "high activity" levels are hovering around what "low activity" has been in the past.

I think it would be neat to have a week-long event where we (and by "we" I mean "people who have the ability to do such things") advertise the site on theOtaku and elsewhere. I know there's a link on the main page of theO, but it's not very prominent, and I think very few people have a reason to check it out. (Why make a new account for a separate site when you're having fun on the main one, where people already know who you are?)

In order to entice people to actually join and participate, we'd have a bunch of new threads/events?ones that play to the strengths of the forum format (rather than the "world" or "art database" format. I'm thinking things similar to "Draw my character!" or 55fiction, which have both been really successful in the past (there are other examples, but those are the ones that come to mind for me, because they're the ones with which I'm most familiar). Maybe someone would be willing to cook up an "entry level" RPG?something that's interesting, but easily accessible to people who are new to the boards and the RPG format that's common here.

If we could get a small blurb on the main page ("Check out OtakuBoards' special Welcome Week Event! Sign up! Be famous! [i]Win fabulous prizes![/i]") or a couple of prominent Worlds to point people this direction, I think we'd get a fair amount of new blood interested in the site. Maybe the leader of the OB Facebook group could send out a message encouraging old memebers people to stop by as well.

I think it could be a lot of fun for everyone involved.[/font]

[Kre]

[quote name='Sara'][font=trebuchet ms] Maybe the leader of the OB Facebook group could send out a message encouraging old memebers people to stop by as well.
[/font][/QUOTE]

There's an OB Facebook group?

[Rachmaninoff]

[FONT="Trebuchet MS"]I'm pretty sure there is a Facebook group for theOtaku as well. At least I'm thinking I recall Adam mentioning it in chat a few times. [/FONT]

[The Spectacular Professor]

[FONT="Comic Sans MS"]There's a group for OB and a "profile" for Spikey, the mascot. Spikey's page updates with whatever news nuggets have been added recently. Adam used to use it as a sock puppet, but I haven't seen him actually post anything in there for a while.[/FONT]

[Xyandar]

Sara I love your idea i was having similar thoughts we need to make the site more known and Sara's idea is awesome! If we could all get people into participating in that, I think it could work!! =)

[Sara]

[font=trebuchet ms]Is this something people are interested in doing?[/font]

[Akieen Cloud]

I'd love to get this place back up and running the way it used to. I know I'm on here once in a while but my absance is more due to life such as kids and home and what not but I usually check like 3 or 4 times a week.

[SigillumDiaboli]

I personally have not noticed, I haven't been on it 4 years xD

[chibi-master]

Didn't Mr. Maul make a similar thread a few months ago?:confused:

[Mr. Maul]

[FONT=Verdana][SIZE=1][COLOR=DimGray][URL="http://www.otakuboards.com/showthread.php?t=60195"]Shh...[/URL]

You'll scare them away.









[/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT]

[Xyandar]

haha sorry man i didnt know you made a thread before me on this. It was just on my mind one night because I check this site every day for updates. But I would love to see the population increase like it used to be before. And yes id be interested in helping advertise this site in any way :)

[AzureWolf]

OB is too set in its ways. Change is required, and like old, postwar hippies who complain about hard times but never went to war, things will not change until there's a rude awakening.

This is just my opinion of course, but until the administration admits finally, "OMG, OB v7 truly has sucked for all these years and we didn't bother to change it for so long. What have we done?!" there just won't be enough of a push to restore OB to its 04-02-2005 (most users ever online) glory.

I mean, is the site still 800 x 600 optimized?!

[Shy]

[size=1]I dunno. This site always goes through ups and downs in terms of activity. At the beginning of the year there was a larger push for new members, and we actually ended up with some good ones. Part of it obviously is that our member base is aging, so the same 16 year-old kids who had nothing but free time to post about Digimon (for example) are now 25, with jobs, relationships, school, and who-knows-what-else. I know I'll be hitting ten years of OB in April... yikes.

This site has always been a bit of a contradiction anyway, since we're an anime message boards that is largely occupied by people who don't care much about anime. I know what continues to drive me to the site are the RPGs, and that's pretty much been the case for the past five years. I do agree that there's more we could do to encourage activity, whether that be bringing in new members or merely encouraging old ones to post again.

I'm game for anything Sara suggests. Go figure.

-Shy[/size]

[Xyandar]

Yeah i know what you mean shy this site is based on anime but alot of the population of this site isn't really a fan of anime. I mean I dont watch much anime myself. I used to when i first joined this site but ive just grown out of it with age. But the other topics like RPG and the video game boards always keep me interested in coming back. I know this would be a bit of an Extreme for otakuboards.com but i suggest that admins of this site should consider changing the site to focus more on the general topics of the forums more than primarily anime. I mean I know its hard to with the name of the site and everything but you dont have to get rid of anime...but perhaps add some video game hero pics(super mario, Link, master chief examples) on the front with the anime guy and maybe some cool hero dude from a movie just to make the site look like we welcome alot more than just anime. I notice thats what i see when i come on here that i feel expected to go to the anime boards and check it out, but i would have no clue what to say on anything in there:P i dunno i know my ideas a bit extreme but i think something along those lines would help the overall population of otakuboards in the long run.

[Rachmaninoff]

[FONT="Trebuchet MS"]I wouldn't say I'm not interested in helping out, but once I'm done seeing what's up I end up focusing on school work and forget about it until the next day when I log back in. I have mentioned it to some people I know, but haven't had any luck finding someone interested enough to actually sign up. [/FONT]

[Xyandar]

Well what if we all came up with some petition thing and we all sign it just to show admin how many people are really considering this in the otaku community. I'll be signature #1 :P

[James]

[quote name='AzureWolf']OB is too set in its ways. Change is required, and like old, postwar hippies who complain about hard times but never went to war, things will not change until there's a rude awakening.

This is just my opinion of course, but until the administration admits finally, "OMG, OB v7 truly has sucked for all these years and we didn't bother to change it for so long. What have we done?!" there just won't be enough of a push to restore OB to its 04-02-2005 (most users ever online) glory.

I mean, is the site still 800 x 600 optimized?![/QUOTE]

[font=franklin gothic medium]I actually addressed a thread similar to this in the staff forum not long ago. Here's what I said there:[/font]

[quote=James]
The problem at OB isn't so much the member population, but more the activity level of registered users. We've done a couple of things that have helped to boost activity slightly (including the monthly newsletter - which I have yet to send out for this month!) as well as restoring the link on theOtaku.com.

In terms of encouraging new users to join, that isn't so much a problem. The difficulty is keeping them here.

There's very little we can do to artificially influence that. The best thing we can do is generate activity ourselves, which is actually of interest to people (i.e. new community events - we haven't had one in a long time).

In other words, there's no substitute for real effort. We can fiddle around the edges as much as we like, but that will make very little difference. People have to want to remain here and they have to have reasons to do so.

Unfortunately a big issue for us is that we are reliant on theOtaku.com's community (as we are part of that community ourselves). And theOtaku itself has suffered from a major drop in both new registrations and activity since moving to Version Vibrant. That change has impacted all corners of the network.

The other issue is that many users simply aren't interested in the longer and more in-depth aspects of OB. They want quicker experiences where they can just jump in and out of the action. OB isn't geared for this by nature.

That is one reason why I have moved to decrease the many restrictions on OB - to add flexibility to the rules and to ensure that our moderation presence is less overbearing.

So to get back to the beginning of my post, I think the best thing we can do right now (in terms of staff involvement) is simply to be more involved. That means more work on events and more active participation across the site.

I would also like to see a group of dedicated staff working on OB World. I think that should be a collaborative effort. We definitely need to pick up on that area as well.

Other than that I definitely welcome any suggestions that you guys have. I can't guarantee that everything will be implemented, but there's no harm in suggestions![/quote]

[font=franklin gothic medium]In terms of the resolution and design stuff - and apart from that really not being a valid reason for our non-growth - I think it's a bit comical. If you actually saw how much work has been done behind the scenes on new versions, you'd be amazed.

The issue is that we haven't had access to the programming resources we need to pull everything together. We have great technical staff in the form of Petie and Des, but their time is limited as well. And we aren't in a position to pay an expert vB programmer (which is what we really need). Our staff all have to volunteer their time. Although I actually paid real money out of my own pocket to get the original version of Otakupedia developed.

So don't be too harsh on that front. Life is very tough all-round. :catgirl:

I'm definitely up for anything that will contribute to the site in any way. I'd definitely rather see positive action than idle complaining, at least.

And if you happen to know any professional vB designers/developers, please do send them my way! :catgirl:[/font]

[Xyandar]

Yeah I understand the complications for sure. What if we added certain Weekly Top 5 things....like for instance. The art topics. People put alot of work into some of the art that goes onto the boards, and many of them dont get the appreciation they deserve. I think it would be neat if we had a Weekly Top 5 best Art pieces or something. Every week an admin or moderator of the art boards can choose a topic to work with such as a certain anime, certain emotion, scenery, environmental picture, etc...And give them a week to make some drawings. I mean any work can be welcomed like photoshopped pictures, drawings, paintings, etc... Then maybe you could hire some members as Weekly judges or something. Their job would be to review the artwork and give some insight. Then at the end of the week, the judges talk amongst eachother and come up with the weeks top 5 pictures with detailed explanations of why they made the weekly top 5 and how to improve so others' pictures can make it on the next top 5. I think that would make the artists on this site more determined to work with this website trying to design the best picture they can for the topic of that week. It would be very interesting. We could also make other Weekly Top 5's such as short stories, poetry, and any other art or literature related subjects. I thought of this last night before going to bed lol. Let me know what you think about that idea. It would be very neat. It might be a slow start at first but i think that once people noticed how neat the weekly top 5 really is, i can see more people taking part in it every week. =)

[James]

[font=franklin gothic medium]In terms of the art idea, we don't need a Mod to do that necessarily. Any member is free to do it.

If you want to start a Top 5 thread, feel free to go ahead with it. :catgirl:

I'm also still looking for people to contribute to OB World, because that ties in a lot with what we're doing here. And it's a good way to promote individual threads. Again, that doesn't require staff - any active member who wants to join in is free to do so.[/font]

[outlawstar69]

I think part of the reason why the activity might not seem as much, would be how the user base has changed - I remember logging on quite frequently at one point, back in the day... but after getting a job, a girlfriend, investing time in other interests, certain things just fall by the wayside. Life's different at 23 than it was at 17, with all that entails.

Lord, I don't know how I ever had the time to put into World of Warcraft, when I was still in school - it's been weeks since I even bothered to log on, and I think I've been the same level for a good 4 months now. Yet, I find myself happily enjoying other things - I'm nearly done with Dragon Age, Advance Wars Dual Strike, and have knocked out several books along the way.

As for membership to the site... so long as there's a core group of users that contribute, I suppose that's what matters - that feeling of community. I'm not sure why I opted to log in today of all days, but it's comforting to see familiar names of the members whose posts I always enjoyed reading.

[Xyandar]

Yeah I hear yah life really takes over once you hit the 20's. I was too busy to come to this site on a daily basis for a long time. Was too busy with school, job hunting, and with friends. But once I got my relaxing nights scheduled then i began coming back here :)

Ah WoW...I put waaay too many hours into that damn game lol didnt even get to the highest level..that games like a drug if you dont play it in pieces it'll take you over lol.

I admit i havent checked much of OB World but i will do so after i send this. And I will think of a decent Weekly top 5 for this week and make a thread =) see how it goes.

[demon39536]

maybe we should have something that *coughtrapsmorevictimscough* no i mean, helps more people see the joy of the OtakuBoards. OtakuBoards, a forum for every type of otaku, or something like that because it feels very empty here, the most members I have seen online at one time was around 10, which doesn't seem like alot to me...
but I also think that more activities would help, but we need to spread the word!

[NaptimeHero]

Well im relatively new here at OB, but i can agree that when im on it does feel empty...also since im one of those 17 year olds that have a infinite amount of free time ill gladly help out in anyway i can actually i have a few ideas :p

one idea that came to me recently is that someobody (or ill do it) should take the graphic worms and make 'em wrap around a shirt all spirally like and then we could distribute them and i think that'd be great advertising.

another idea is that we simply have somebody (or me again) make a iron-on of OB's logo and then just put em on a shirt we have laying around. :catgirl: comfort and advertising.