Possible plan for the community.

[Ed]

After getting LOTS of feedback over the years about the layout of the community, the overriding problem seems to be the forums. I’ve reduced and reduced the forums until they are half the number they were at the start but, judging by the feedback, it hasn’t helped at all.

The new plan is to completely remove the forums and use a blog as the centre of the community. It would still allow for embedding videos, posting news/polls/photos etc. and interaction can still take place via comments.

Profiles and private messages would still be there and you can still add people as friends etc. The Master Dare List would be unchanged.

The same extra content would be available to community supporters but the supporter only forums would not be there.

I bounced the idea in the Skype chat group but no-one seemed too fussed either way.

 

Any opinions? Good idea or bad idea?

[David]

I think you’ll find traffic will reduce.

I may log in only once a week, whilst visiting every other day, but it’s the forums I look at.

 

 

 

Ed likes this

[Ed]

Thank you for the feedback.

I genuinely don’t know where to go with this. I’m stuck in a loop with the forum. Hardly anyone posts here, claiming that they don’t because the forums are too quiet (because no-one posts).

At the current rate of loss, I’ve got 5 months and the site will have lost all its visitors. I don’t want to just let this community die.

[Ed]

I should probably point out that the forums make up 90+% of the community site so it would be difficult to not visit the forums while you’re here. There is no community blog right now.

[Ed]

Anyone else got an opinion on this, or any ideas?

I really don’t want to close this community as we get to Christmas this year but if I don’t make some kind of change that makes the community more appealing to people to spend time here and interact, that’s what we’re facing.

[Ed]

The most popular page on the site in July was the Naked Experiments Glossary. It got nearly 6 times as many visitors as the next nearest. The forum (as a whole – ie adding the pageviews for all pages of the forum together as though they are one) came in a close third, just slightly behind the Master Dare List page.

The average number of visits per month for the top 10% of visitors fell from 8.1 to 6.6. The number of visitors who arrived for the first time in July but then visited again fell by 22% compared to the same figure in June, even though the number of new visitors fell by “only” 18%. I’ve got to do something to make the site stickier – that much is obvious.

[Author]

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