The Legend wrote:If we want to see this forum have greater activity and see our community grow then that's the type of environment we need to be encouraging. We need more respect here to grow this community.
The lack of growth on the forum has absolutely nothing to do with the attitudes of members or the tones of their posts, and i get sort of annoyed when that's implied. Being the person in charge of running this place, I tend to take it personally whenever people have a "that's why this place doesn't grow" attitude.
Here are the REAL reasons why growth has been quite slow:
1. It's hard to optimize forums for search engines.
2. Right now we don't have a mobile version of our forums, which is a huge penalty in Google search rankings. I do not have the expertise/know-how needed to resolve this problem.
3. We aren't doing enough outreach on social media. I need help with this. I don't have the time to handle it all myself, because I run several other sites, work full time, sing in two choirs and am in a show all while planning a wedding that's happening in a few months. People have helped out a bit in the past but usually stop. We have to be persistent in this area if we're going to see any sort of growth.
It needs to be a collaborative effort if we're going to help this place grow, and it's pretty much been me and @Locke who have done the vast majority of the work on tasks that would stimulate such growth. If people want to see this place get more traffic, then they need to chip in. We don't have the luxury of our site basically advertising itself like larger forums do. We're a small community that basically started from scratch. It's tough going, and we need to work harder if we're going to grow.
Ok, so now that I've responded to that, all I really have to say about this thread is that both sides are acting childish. You guys are deliberately winding each other up and trying not to understand each other so you have something to cause a ruckus about.
A bin man is a garbage man. Scollops are like fish or something, I still don't even know. Let it gooooo, let it goooooo