You might be missing the point. The core issue for getting more POSTING traffic, which is what you are focusing on, is the quality of the community. Not creative tricks, tagging, contests, or any other such thing. I for one ignore all of it and pretty much always have. The number one reason to hang out in a place with other admins, besides trying to sell to them like we all do in some form with our sigs or posts, is to bond with them and form a useful community. If management condones or enables some little punk mouthing off to them, me, or those I bond with, it's a very powerful reason for me not to post here. What you are doing, in effect, is asking someone like me to ignore someone that needs a verbal beating, and to ignore you and your mods that basically allow it. I'm not that into ignoring and I am not that into enabling dysfunction. You saying "as much as you don't like ..." translates into "I don't plan on enforcing a standard that disables asses like this guy so please ignore my weak moderation style and standards."

Gee, how inviting.

In all likelihood you need to get back to basics (quality content and strong moderation) and really focus on the one thing you have here that is unique and special - Post Fusion. That or come up with something ELSE as powerful and unique as Post Fusion. I doubt you would get that big of an idea from a thread like this. Most would go do it themselves if they had the idea.

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Reasons I no longer even read the site?

1. Annoying member that is kept around cause he reports spam which is a job anyone and everyone would do if the site was active.

2. Long load times from having to query to many different servers in order to load one single page. It should not take over 30 seconds to load any page when your on broadband.

3. Annoying theme, sure new fancy designs are neat but I've managed to get along just fine for over 11 years and nearly 3 million posts using stock looking themes customized to fit the colors and feel of the site I want.

4. Contests to me are annoying things I ignore. You can't build a community based on giveaways. You give stuff away people will show up for the free stuff and leave. If I do contests on my site it's to reward the members for staying there or helping us reach a goal, not to drive inflated traffic that won't be retained.

5. I dunno I just felt like putting down 5 reasons!

I have to say that was a very good post

There are tons of webmaster forums, and plenty of admin ones as well. If you've got members who just annoy others with their constant moaning, you'll lose the members who actually mean something to another site.

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This situation has been dealt with. We've taken actions to prevent further abuse to members by other members. We're working hard to get back... Just give us a little time.

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No prob, and thanks. By the way, I liked the old skin and love the new skin. It's a nice, softer, somewhat more modern feel.

I was also thinking that there were a lot of quality threads here from the past. It might not be a bad idea to cherrypick and bump some regularly.

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Yeah, we've got a couple other subtle changes we might implement over the next few weeks... Some Shock n awe' sorta stuff...

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Shock and awe can be a good thing.

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The postfusion is what brought me here, so i'd love to see improvements being made on that.

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OK I am going to chime in finally after reading all the other posts. This is not directed at Eric, who I have become friendly with over the months, or any one person or mod in particular. I have been a big participant here in the past and a multiple time "supporter" with donations.

1) You ARE NOT moderating/admin the site. Period. There are little to NO new posts from the admins or mods on the site. Want to motivate people, YOU should be leading the forum, posting new informational threads of stuff you find around the net, etc. I do it constantly on my forums. I look for relevant info that will help my members or they will be interested in and I start threads with info. On this site it seems no one is running the ship. I NEVER or rarely see anything initiated by the staff anymore.

1.a) Make someone a "new member mod" who sends IM's to new members (not the canned auto one), directs them, helps them get involved. Not the normal hello posts in the introduction threads, but even more help to get them involved.
- Many people still join here, but it seems beyond their introduction post they participate rarely.

2) You should have blitzed the internet about Post Fusion a year ago when the site was first purchased. PF is COMPLETELY unique and there is not another site out there offering an automated exchange system like the one Larry and Ryan built here and you now have. I USED to be a huge participant in it, but now it has run down to a crawl. That is YOUR FAULT as the owners of the site. If you had promoted it correctly and driven hundreds of new users to the system the REST of the AF forums would have benefited also from increased posting on the overall site.
At the current time I do not care about PF like some others have stated BUT it could have been another element of the site that DROVE lots of posts and participation on

3) Who is out promoting this site? Which one of you is posting on other forums with links to this site, etc etc etc. Is advertising money being spent to promote the forum in any manner at all?

4) You should have banned the members who were constantly criticizing everything LONG AGO. Completely non productive and negative for the site overall. Their constant negativity is so boring and so disruptive that I personally know 2-3 people who don't come back here anymore because of that. They just got tired of wading through the crap to get to what this site used to be - A GREAT RESOURCE AND HELP FOR WEBMASTERS. Basically it seems that you let the site be run by the inmates.

5) Unless you want to do a truly huge money contest that you actually PROMOTE all over the net (blogs, other sites, paid advertising, etc) and it attracts thousands of new participants, I see no point in doing more contests. Most of the regulars never cared about that anyway. That being said I do not see any value at this point to running a contest with thousands of dollars in prizes on this site. There is no one to participate That money could be used better to advertise the site elsewhere.

Finally - this site is still ranked around 60,000 by Alexa and while it was once higher I believe it still has a PR3 ranking. I don't know how much Eric paid Ryan and those guys for this site, but I am sure it was enough that it makes no sense at all for it to be neglected like it has for months and months and months. You are almost starting again from scratch at this point because you have lost all the old posting members.

Once you have an ACTUAL plan in place to get this place rolling again I would contact the 7630 members in the database with a humble, honest, and positive campaign to get them back. You have over 7000 emails in the database here and I have never received ANYTHING from this site. Not a newsletter like the other big webmaster forums do, or anything.

My fingers hurt and I have said what I wanted to. It makes me UPSET that this site has died. It used to be one of my favorite places and one that I read MULTIPLE times a day. Now I rarely come 2 times a week. Sad.

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i dont think he is sating the forum is crowded with posts.

infact this forum is relatively quiet now compared to 12 months ago.

and seems to get slower each week...IMHO

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