The problem at hands

[Sivert3]

In any forum there will always be a constant stream of users leaving for various reasons. This stream can't be stopped, they will leave whether you want it or not, and nothing can change that.

For those of you who where at The High Council you probably remembered the good times when there where more posts than anyone could follow:

With peaks of 2500 posts a month. After a year it stabilized to about 300-400 posts.

But you probably don't remember the endless stream newbies leaving before anyone had a chance to reply to their posts:


The few user that stayed however thrived making a userbase of less than 30 active user, posting more than 10 times a month on average each. While the newbies might have been bothersome for some they replaced the regulars that left. And they kept the forum alive, preventing steady stream of users leaving from affecting the userbase.

The old forum was stable. Users that left where replaced by new users.


And this is where our problem today is: 13 new user this year.
With a breakthrough rate of about 10% there is only 1 new regular this year. There is simply nobody to replace the ones that leaves.

[Marik]

My face...its melting...too many numbers...

But yes you are right. However suggestions for getting new members here would be fairly useful, probably more so than merely showing us all our failings in explicit detail

[Sivert3]

I have a list of suggestions:

• Link here
  Currently its almost impossible to search for this board. There is only one link here (according to google) from http://www.colba.net/~tempest and the only search related to dragons that leads there is "dragons" (without quotes). If we made more links point here more people would find us.
• Fix the home page
  If you type in http://www.dragnix.net/ in your browser you end on a 403 access forbidden page, this makes people think its abandoned since its been there since February 2003. If this page is replaced by an index, that will not happen.
• Advertise this site on forums
  Now I mean clever advertisement. Post a question related to dragons (look into Dragon Discussions for some inspiration) and see who replies and who is the most enthusiastic. Make them see this forum by putting a link to a discussion here.