I wrote this post as a response to the "Is HF dying" thread in general board.
Quite frankly it takes a blind man to NOT see how this forum just ain't what it used to be. Of course we could just not give a shit and continue the way we are right now. But sense tells me that if the current course isn't taking us to where we want it, a drastic change is needed.
The problem with this website can be assessed just by looking at the main page. Look at all those fucking boards. You have to scroll down several pages worth of subforums, many of which didn't see a single post in months. HF thinks it's a community of thousand of active members, when in fact, it's more like 20-30 recurring posters. HF needs to downsize, a LOT. There are a lot of board features which are not used and hadn't seen activity in ages. A lot of the boards could be merged or deleted outright. For instance why do we have a separate board for PC games and all the consoles, an even genres of games such a various MMORPG? Just merge them all in a single "games" board. Only when a single discrete subject receives a disproportionate amount of attention, such as hentai gaming or modding, should it have its own separate board. Then we have various useless sub forums dedicated to special interests, like automotive, Japanese TV dramas, photography. JUST MERGE THEM INTO A "HOBBIES AND INTERESTS" BOARD. The same goes for the entire technology and merchandise section - they should really be just one board instead of a bunch of separate subforums grouped together. Last but not least - the community centre, where we talk about the site and its community itself. Just like elsewhere, it should only be a single board. The purpose of all those separate subforums could be better served in a series of stickies.
Then we have an extensive section of articles, blogs. Now the question I ask, does anyone even fucking read them? I might spend an hour writing a entry there, but only 2-3 people even see it at best, and out of these 2-3, 1-2 are bots. I mean it's a nice feature, but like with many other things on this website, we could better do without. IF you want to leave an blog-like entry, sure go ahead, do so on your personal profile. Or better yet, start a thread.
Then we have pub bar, underground, general discussion, and "in the news". These are the places, beside anime discussion that I find most active. The pub/bar is where people talk about their personal life, and the underground is just random bullshit. Personally I think pub/bar and underground should be merged into one board, because there isn't such a big difference between what's discussed in them. "In the news" tends to hold heated political debates, while general discussion consists of mostly just old threads necro'd and bot spam. "In the news" should really deal with important on-going events and not news snippets or political sound bites echoed by the mass media. If you want to talk about some stupid news tidbit or yellow press article, start a thread in the general board or the underground.
Going down the list, we have groups and a lot of people have noticed that they're totally inactive. I think this is because most people don't find a lot of appeal in them, when the same purpose can be handled by threads. For instance we have HUGE and I say HUGE threads in the hentai anime section devoted to Murakami, Black Lilith or Umemaro 3D works, yet the relevant groups to these kinds of subjects BARELY scrape any posts. There should be some kind of minor incentive for being part of a group. For instance when a member joins or starts a group he could have a little bib under his username, or a custom user title box indicating his status within that group. A trivial little thing like that can go a long way to encourage members to participate in group activity. Inactive groups should be pruned. In order for a group to be active, it either needs to have at least 25 signatures, or ask for special permission via PM to admin (for small, but active groups such as my Hokuto no Ken fanclub) from at least 3 different members. Also, groups which don't have any posts or were inactive for several months should be shut down. The only exception to this proposed rule should be HF-Lazy, by definition.
The point of all this merging and deleting of boards is to concentrate the flow of posts within more narrow avenues where members can have a clear picture of what discussions are active, and see an opportunity to participate in a thread that receives regular attention from others. Since we're a small community, this would benefit discussion without cluttering up the thread listing too much. Let's face it, we aren't 4chan or reddit. Our Alexa rank is in the deep shitter. We don't have active hubs of posters dedicated to a particular interest for which the presence of such subforums would actually make sense. The odd active member isn't going to bother checking on every single board whether or not it has been updated. When the range of his posts is distributed among dozen of boards, it's a no brainer that only a very, very limited number of people would even read them. So in the end either his topics won't be replied to, or he'll quickly learn to focus on the most active boards, leaving the others to neglect. When we have say, 20 boards divided between an upper bound estimate of 20 regular members, and of these 20 only 3 receive the bulk of activity, one shouldn't be surprised at the result that the other 17 are barely active, and most threads that should have been distributed among those 17, are instead started in those 3. Thus we tend to think that HF is a dying community. It isn't dying, just very small. You just can't continue this policy of accommodating everyone's potential interest in a separate subforum. It may look neat, but in reality it's totally unnecessary, and in fact significantly impedes user activity. So bottom line is, get rid or merge the boards which have little to no user activity, and you will see the amount of discussion go up, and perhaps even new active members.
Quite frankly it takes a blind man to NOT see how this forum just ain't what it used to be. Of course we could just not give a shit and continue the way we are right now. But sense tells me that if the current course isn't taking us to where we want it, a drastic change is needed.
The problem with this website can be assessed just by looking at the main page. Look at all those fucking boards. You have to scroll down several pages worth of subforums, many of which didn't see a single post in months. HF thinks it's a community of thousand of active members, when in fact, it's more like 20-30 recurring posters. HF needs to downsize, a LOT. There are a lot of board features which are not used and hadn't seen activity in ages. A lot of the boards could be merged or deleted outright. For instance why do we have a separate board for PC games and all the consoles, an even genres of games such a various MMORPG? Just merge them all in a single "games" board. Only when a single discrete subject receives a disproportionate amount of attention, such as hentai gaming or modding, should it have its own separate board. Then we have various useless sub forums dedicated to special interests, like automotive, Japanese TV dramas, photography. JUST MERGE THEM INTO A "HOBBIES AND INTERESTS" BOARD. The same goes for the entire technology and merchandise section - they should really be just one board instead of a bunch of separate subforums grouped together. Last but not least - the community centre, where we talk about the site and its community itself. Just like elsewhere, it should only be a single board. The purpose of all those separate subforums could be better served in a series of stickies.
Then we have an extensive section of articles, blogs. Now the question I ask, does anyone even fucking read them? I might spend an hour writing a entry there, but only 2-3 people even see it at best, and out of these 2-3, 1-2 are bots. I mean it's a nice feature, but like with many other things on this website, we could better do without. IF you want to leave an blog-like entry, sure go ahead, do so on your personal profile. Or better yet, start a thread.
Then we have pub bar, underground, general discussion, and "in the news". These are the places, beside anime discussion that I find most active. The pub/bar is where people talk about their personal life, and the underground is just random bullshit. Personally I think pub/bar and underground should be merged into one board, because there isn't such a big difference between what's discussed in them. "In the news" tends to hold heated political debates, while general discussion consists of mostly just old threads necro'd and bot spam. "In the news" should really deal with important on-going events and not news snippets or political sound bites echoed by the mass media. If you want to talk about some stupid news tidbit or yellow press article, start a thread in the general board or the underground.
Going down the list, we have groups and a lot of people have noticed that they're totally inactive. I think this is because most people don't find a lot of appeal in them, when the same purpose can be handled by threads. For instance we have HUGE and I say HUGE threads in the hentai anime section devoted to Murakami, Black Lilith or Umemaro 3D works, yet the relevant groups to these kinds of subjects BARELY scrape any posts. There should be some kind of minor incentive for being part of a group. For instance when a member joins or starts a group he could have a little bib under his username, or a custom user title box indicating his status within that group. A trivial little thing like that can go a long way to encourage members to participate in group activity. Inactive groups should be pruned. In order for a group to be active, it either needs to have at least 25 signatures, or ask for special permission via PM to admin (for small, but active groups such as my Hokuto no Ken fanclub) from at least 3 different members. Also, groups which don't have any posts or were inactive for several months should be shut down. The only exception to this proposed rule should be HF-Lazy, by definition.
The point of all this merging and deleting of boards is to concentrate the flow of posts within more narrow avenues where members can have a clear picture of what discussions are active, and see an opportunity to participate in a thread that receives regular attention from others. Since we're a small community, this would benefit discussion without cluttering up the thread listing too much. Let's face it, we aren't 4chan or reddit. Our Alexa rank is in the deep shitter. We don't have active hubs of posters dedicated to a particular interest for which the presence of such subforums would actually make sense. The odd active member isn't going to bother checking on every single board whether or not it has been updated. When the range of his posts is distributed among dozen of boards, it's a no brainer that only a very, very limited number of people would even read them. So in the end either his topics won't be replied to, or he'll quickly learn to focus on the most active boards, leaving the others to neglect. When we have say, 20 boards divided between an upper bound estimate of 20 regular members, and of these 20 only 3 receive the bulk of activity, one shouldn't be surprised at the result that the other 17 are barely active, and most threads that should have been distributed among those 17, are instead started in those 3. Thus we tend to think that HF is a dying community. It isn't dying, just very small. You just can't continue this policy of accommodating everyone's potential interest in a separate subforum. It may look neat, but in reality it's totally unnecessary, and in fact significantly impedes user activity. So bottom line is, get rid or merge the boards which have little to no user activity, and you will see the amount of discussion go up, and perhaps even new active members.