I'm willing to put all the resources of TovenSolutions to work to get more members. So I'm officially opening this thread for discussion. What piece of technology can I offer or develop that will breath new life into this forum?

A cloning machine. Just clone our top posters and the problem is solved.

Well I hate to say it but I don't think the front page screams click the forums! Instead it screams close this window. Maybe tcforums.com should link directly to the forums and what's now the front page should be the link.

Agreed. Before anything else, we really, really need to do something with the front page -- either getting rid of it or replacing it with something new and easier to update (so we can pretend to be a real site and post news or something)...

That's true. If I happened upon that front page I would assume the site hadn't been updated in years and I wouldn't even bother clicking on the forums.

The Front Page Wrote:We're back, ladies!
2008-10-03 00:00:00

Tendo City is here, in it's infancy, it's testing-stage. I'll be transferring reviews and all.

Yeah, this doesn't exactly scream "bustling community".

Definitely not, that's for sure...

Well, that was posted twenty-one months in the future. Who knows what will happen between now and then!?

I think we need to find a way to have a forum-integrated front page like we did years ago. It practically updated itself, which if nothing else gives errant passers-by the illusion that people do shop here.

Ryan Wrote:I think we need to find a way to have a forum-integrated front page like we did years ago. It practically updated itself, which if nothing else gives errant passers-by the illusion that people do shop here.

It didn't really update itself. That was Laser Link and me who added popular topics to the front page. Although I'm sure a little PHP could create something that would be self-updating.

Quote:It didn't really update itself. That was Laser Link and me who added popular topics to the front page.Although I'm sure a little PHP could create something that would be self-updating.

One or the other of these would be a really good idea.

DMiller Wrote:It didn't really update itself. That was Laser Link and me who added popular topics to the front page. Although I'm sure a little PHP could create something that would be self-updating.

I'm talking about the one we had that was completely integrated with vBulletin, back in 2003. Most of its content came right from the forums, and the news section showed threads posted in the Tendo City forum, saving the need to actually post news stories. It was great, but the add-on couldn't carry over to the new forum software and I never did look for an update.

Could we find that or something similar for this forum version? What was it?

This place, if possible, seems to be getting worse posts-wise... is there anything we actually can (or want to) do, or should we just give up and say 'ten posts total a day (or whatever) is good enough'?

If there's anything we need, it's less forums so that everything is consolidated in as few places as possible.

What, then? Tendo and Multiconsole, Ramble and Debate? The current 'Zelda' forum has had many topics and can't just be put into one or the other without manually going through all the posts and separating them. Comics and Reviews need to stay unless we get some new frontpage system we actually use that could replace them (yeah right -- even if we did, like the last one it would be easier to just use the in-forum system...). Forum 5 is admins-only, so needs to stay (this one of course could be folded into Forum 5 or Ramble, depending on which makes more sense.). Really, I don't think that that would make a huge difference...

Actually, I'm in favor of culling the forum count myself.

The Zelda forum can be made a subforum of Tendo City, unless it is going to remain as the flavor-of-the-month thing, which it hasn't in forever.

Even this "NEED NEW MEMBERS" forum could serve just as much use as a single stickied thread.

Honestly, the place is really cluttered these days. Seems like we have more forums than people to post in them.

Forum 5 as an admin-only forum is kind of a joke, isn't it? How many non-admins are left now? Plus, it's almost literally been years since it's seen anything close to regular use.

The Online Trading forum serves no purpose with so few people.

Hi kids, I see TC is rock and rolling into the 2010s - actually, it's more like a geriatric intensive-care patient with pneumonia who's running a marathon and we're all waiting to see if he'll even reach the start line...

I agree the multiple forums are kind of silly, I would vouch for one single forum or two at most (one for video games and one for everything else). I'd be tempted to add that old yarn about needing content, too. Consider it this way: at this point, nobody's "reviving" anything. If you want more people to visit these forums, you need to consider this the starting point, "brainstorming" if you will, for your new space-age website.

Merging Tendo and Multiconsole and Ramble and Religion & Philosophy might work, though the "Twilight Princess" forum is half Tendo/Multiconsole content and half Ramble content, so that wouldn't be as easy... we'd need to separate out the gaming threads and the Star Wars/Anime/etc threads, and send each to their appropriate place (perhaps the anime ones to the 'movie reviews' subforum of Ramble and rename it 'movie/television somethingorother'? I do like having places to keep similar threads, like the review forums, which of course would stay as they are.)...

Actually, considering how incredibly small we are right now, I'm quite in favor of knocking everything down to three, Tendo, Multiconsole, and Ramble. Maybe make Religion a subforum of Ramble and maybe not. But we definitely do need to downsize a bit, I think. Reviews could sub-Tendo, and Comics could sub-Ramble.

I like having them as separate parts though because of how they (Comics and Reviews) aren't just subforums, they're website sections without a website...