So, this isn't relevant quite to continued forum software development, but how do we intend to make the forum grow more? We've been hemorrhaging users for a while now, is it just intended for us to gain new users over time? Does RPGuild show up high on google results for play by post roleplaying? should we advertise in certain other roleplaying communities? (Not other forums of course, but perhaps things like reddit or more general roleplaying forums?)
Right now the guild gets about 10% fewer unique user visits per day than it did at the height of last year. I'll have to dig into oldguild's stats to compare pre- and post-guildfall which will be more interesting. Like, when was oldguild's busiest month and how does it compare to previous-guilds busiest month and then compared to current-guild's current month?
The guild has always ranked pretty high for most relevant google queries, so people looking for "roleplay forums" and such will find the guild if they're looking for that sort of thing. That's how the guild gets most of its users, from what I can guess looking at its stats. And though its rankings took a slight beating when it was throwing errors every few page-loads last year (google deranks poorly performing websites), it's recovered most of the ground it lost since its relaunch.
As for growing the userbase, lately I've been focusing on features that make the Guild more pleasant to use in general. For instance, receiving notifications for mentions increases the level of interaction and makes the work of "is there anything I need to reply to?" much less of a chore.
The recent change of showing the amount of viewers in each forum and topic hopefully makes the place also feel more like a living community. And that's a feature I had to turn off on oldguild because that plugin didn't seem to scale very well.
One thing I want to do is increase the guild's social features. Make it easier and easier to keep up with people and increase the ways you can interact. For example, a friends list. Maybe any friends you add to your list will be highlighted wherever you see their username (like in the list of users viewing the current topic). Also, perhaps you get a personal tab that shows the latest activity of your friends so that you can keep up with their going-ons. That all is just an example.
I'd also like to think of ways to get help newbies get acclimated to the community, especially if they're not experienced roleplayers. I was once a part of a roleplaying forum where newbies would get assigned to mentors, people that volunteered to help. The mentor would make the first move and lower the barrier of entry for newcomers that are often likely to be overwhelmed, intimidated, or not faffed enough to figure the place out. Maybe that kind of thing would increase traction for the new user that do come.
I also want to start taking more advantage of the fact that the guild is custom-coded so I have pretty much unlimited power to cater to roleplayers in ways that other sites are at the mercy of their forum software's plugin community. So far I've been mostly booked implementing plain ol' forum-fare features, but I'm covering some serious ground. I can definitely fit for custom and even exotic features into my schedule.
As for attracting people off-site, I'm always open to ideas. I see people with those dragcave.net banners in the sigs. Maybe I can make some similarly dynamic images that automatically update with your RP stats. Something like that RP Card I spoke of a long time ago?
I think most of the work really involves on-site focus, like making the guild better and better, cutting down the barriers for newbies, ensuring that users have a solid social kit to interact on the guild, and maybe even making the guild less ugly.
As an example of a cool custom feature that I can code, I noticed that EtherPad (
First-class EtherPad integration would be pretty fun.
