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Well, it's been almost 8 years since I first started this forum, and during that time there have been over 28,000 posts made here. Unfortunately, I have come to realize that the forum has not succeeded as I hoped. I very much appreciate the many comments made by the core group of dedicated posters here, but it is simply too little to continue. In my opinion, a successful forum needs to have consistent organic growth, and WCF has not experience that. Perhaps I have been too heavy-handed with spammers that I cut out legitimate traffic, but in any case our growth has been negligible recently. I will have to figure out what to do with the forum, but I just wanted to give a heads-up.
I agree that the growth has been slow to negligible with only 4 or 5 of us posting, so I can see your point. It's still pretty sad though. Wish there was some way we could advertise this. Too bad we couldn't get involved with schools somehow.
I will be sad to see it go. I have made several friends here over the 6+ years I have been posting here. Friends I don't want to lose. I know the forum has been slow lately and has started to degenerate into a political forum. ( I am just as guilty of that as anybody else). Don't let the forum die though. If you don't want to keep it alive let one of us take it over. I would be willing to do so and bear the costs of running and administering it.I keep thinking over the past few weeks I need to start more topics but between maintaining my own pages and working on the house there are just not enough hours in the day.If cost is the issue I am sure we can some up with a solution.What do you say?
I say your observation about it degenerating into a political forum is right, though I don't think there is anything wrong with that per se. For some time, I kind of wished that I could make our political discussions publicly-accessible so that they would bring in more members. For whatever reason, the forum has not succeeded strictly as a history place. I don't know if this is for lack of interest, or because I made it too hard to register, or what. In any case, if there were life to be had in this forum in the future, it would probably need to be broader than just history.
I do not understand why no one has registered here in the past three months. I did install an anti-spam component on registration, but I just did a test registration and it worked. This is what frustrates me.
Do you do any type of analytics? What do your visitor stats look like? I don't understand it either. Maybe we just need to ramp up topic creation. Don't give up hope just yet.
I'll take it over Phid if you decide to abandon it. There is a wealth of information stored here that should remain open to the public. I check in every day, but I don't post on anything unless it really interests me. My time is limited these days so I cannot participate like I used to. I totally understand what you're going through as I've scrapped several sites lately. When you're ready to transfer the domain let me know, and save the database so I can transfer the data as well. I will continue to use the SMF format of course.
I have a page on Facebook for the forum, but I haven't really exploited it for promotional purposes.
It has been my experience with Facebook thus far that it is fairly worthless as a method of promotion. Perhaps I will do more on Battles & Book Reviews to promote the site. I am getting pretty steady non-spider traffic of about 750 unique visitors a day, maybe I can drive more traffic to WCF. I am also going to try and start more topics on history stuff.
As I see it, here are my options with the forum, along with some negatives for each option:1) Keep the forum as is [negative: slow growth]2) Abandon it completely [no growth]3) Hand the reins to Donnie with the hope that a new perspective/vision will enliven it [uncertain growth]4) Revamp the forum - maintain the history categories as most prominent, but consolidate; add additional categories for posting, such as politics, perhaps sports [uncertain prospects of success]5) Revamp the site - add a front end to the site to feature blog posts/other content, and the forum continues as another feature rather than the main star [much more work]Perhaps I'm leaning toward #3 or #4. I feel that the forum has a wealth of information that I like to consult from time to time, and it's also a good place to go when I have questions about history that are out of my area of knowledge. Yet, I also enjoy having a place to discuss politics, or other areas of life (e.g. things discussed in some of Donnie's other forums, such as ILS). I think the trick would be to maintain the primacy of the forum's history role while expanding its scope to help bring in new members.
I like #4 and will volunteer to assist in any way I can to keep the forum going. Anything you need or would like me to do let me know. I actually think adding some areas for other topics is a great idea.In the past I have toyed with the idea of adding a forum to my website but have decided aginst it because WCF is here and you are right that there is a wealth of information on here that it would be a shame to lose.
