Email Chain? Discord server? A group chat?

The forums looked very... dormant, anytime of the week I visited. So I was wondering, does everyone gathered elsewhere other than the forum to have a more direct line of communication as well as easing one another to a casual conversation.

An email chain? A group chat in some popular social media platform?

We would love it if more members were able to contribute to the forum a bit more (like you do!). It seems that many members see the forum, join, but don't come back. If we knew why, we might be able to do something about it. There's no other medium where members of this forum interact.

One can speculate, and boy I have one.

Internet as we knew today has turned into an endless streams of entertainment contents, spoonfeeding its users every minute or even seconds with new contents. It's not an exaggeration when people describes how forums and imageboards were relics from bygone era, just about everyone can't sit still without being distracted from the internet nowadays. Back then, social platforms were decentralized, each niche community had their own forum site. Now? Everyone only ever goes to reddit and checks r/(niche-hobby-here), or a growing discord server describing itself as a community that revolves around (niche-hobby-here).

And to really drive home how spoiled internet users nowadays really is, every social media with a timeline feature always has an endless-scrolling mode, just so the users will never run out of content to consume.

I for one, is obsessed with old stuff. So I have always been okay with using these kinds of platforms, even this username of mine comes from a tripcode I accidentally discovered in a relatively 'dormant' imageboard I'm frequent in. Same problem there as well with these... dormant-all-year-round situation. People over there made a discord server and all sorts of group chats, newer people blamed the lack of activities within the site on those social media groups, people posting a single introduction thread for their first and final footprint on the site. But over here, the answer is crystal clear. People turned away because nothing is happening. This is reinforced by the academic studies that found majority of consumer's attention span is a LITERAL 3 SECONDS. Blame it on the speed of light today's information were travelling at.

My main takeaway from the previous community I'm in, is to hold close onto your most loyal and frequently-appearing members. They're the only ones you can reliably count on to make yet another appearance tomorrow, so a tight-knitted community is an inevitability, a must in my opinion. Regular members get to know each other and become friends, which will likely kept them coming back to the site because they wanted to keep in touch. When newcomers sees at least a semblance of activity, hopefully that urges them to join the community's social circle.

Just like our ancestors surviving as hunters/gatherers with their packs, interaction is the key to build a sustaining community. People come together, and a community supports itself. I hope all that ramblings get my points across, sorry for going on a tangent xP

Thank you for your thoughts.

I once joined a forum that was super-busy. If I posted something, it would be immediately overtaken by a dozen posts by other members. I thought to myself then that I would hate it if this forum got like that.

Whilst a few more active members would be nice, I'm ok that members and guests take something away from the forum even if they don't put anything back.

We do have our little band of brothers and sisters in PowerPoint which I'm glad about.

The main perk that small communities does have is indeed their intimacy, its similar to how the rural and small villages had a more welcoming and kind folks than that of big cities.

In any case, I don't think this place will be flooded with people nor gain much traction anytime soon. Just one of the dozens comfy internet corners, and I appreciate it for being the way it is.

!C8Hypela/M!!fN+hj5w wrote:Just one of the dozens comfy internet corners, and I appreciate it for being the way it is.

That's why I'm here - made 2 friends I keep in touch with also through PM. My comfy internet corner.
It's a site I comfortably return to because it doesn't override me with huge quantities of posts overriding posts, 100 new topics being submitted every day, etc, etc. There's also the added benefit that I have learned to use PowerPoint in ways otherwise unknown to me and those ways seem to go up my alley. johnr's patience in explaining and rusnakcreative's encouragements to push forward were what I needed in an area (PowerPoint) which turned out not too overwhelming to learn. Unless rusnakcreative will start encouraging me again to start learning VBA... lol!

...but who knows?

BTW - I wrote my first macro in VBA! It doesn't work but who cares!

There is now an unrelated Discord server run by xPLAYn. Some of us have already joined it.

You can read more about it from his forum post here: Discord

P.S. xPLAYn is Elijah on his Discord

If you want some quick discussion amongst users on here, I have turned on the chat box feature which can be found at the bottom of the main forum page.