by Southern Dad » Sun Mar 08, 2015 7:01 am
The site isn't growing because it isn't providing what people are seeking when they come here. Speaking for myself, I came here for political conversation, for debate and yes, even a little arguing. Throw in a little off topic conversation and you've got a recipe for a community. I saw the site struggling but having the potential to go that direction. Then the bot posters or whatever they are, didn't help in my view. My issue with Philly caused me to look for another site, which I found. I'm as active as ever, just not here.
The site needs to attract new users but more importantly those users need to want to stay and be active. One thing that I've seen on other sites is "thread bans." Where a user is banned from that thread, rather than the site. Let's face it, the users getting suspended here, are usually the active posters. Another site, that I visit but don't like because it is too active, actually removes parts of posts replacing them with things like, "Troll comment removed per rule #XX." No doubt they must have a huge moderator staff with lots of time.
The site that I visit now for political conversation, which I will not name because I don't want to try and steal users from here, is on the same software, at least it appears to be the same. One of the features that they use at the bottom of the forum index in place of the Top Thanks section here, they have Total Users that Visited in the last 24 hours, then give the number and lists them. I'd like to see that on here, then challenge ourselves to get that number to grow.
The truth is, in answer to the title of the thread, if all the trolls, bots and such were gone, there wouldn't be many people left. I was active on the site less than sixty days and made it to the top 30 or so posters. I did that without posting one liner posts and still used consolidated multi-quote posting putting several answers in one post rather than individual posts.
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