The forums are stagnating - what should be done about it?

[MaxwellGT2000]

There's a lot of reasons for stagnating community, it really does have to do with not as many lurkers coming in, it hurts when they can't easily find the forum topics, the main reason I signed up back in the day was my constant browsing of the numbers and every time I hit the home page I'd see hot topics refresh, then one day I saw a silly discussion that made me want to post.

Back then we were not noticed that much by big mainstream internet groups, we were a small but excellent community, ran by some level headed mods that moderated with common sense, IE it was a bit stricter than it is now, cause being an obvious problem after your third ban or so they'd just permaban you.... with the exception of Leo-J and Soriku lol they spammed it up constantly but I think everyone enjoyed their bitter rivalry and how much fun it was to mess with Leo-J.

Getting back on track, we were a small exceptional community that was ever growing because of amazing members, making good topics, with good common sense moderation, and a good easy to understand design, even if the home page did become a bit cluttered.

Basically the decline happened with poor changes in moderation (even before MM476 became a mod) basically caving to the whining of a small group of users that it's "not right" for moderators to ban at their own discretion, so then an iron clad set of rules came about, then these small groups found loopholes, which were still banned for until something changed and moderation became less about common sense and more about strict wording of the rules, this does not work as just like anything people will lie straight to your face, thus these people will lie to get away with what they're posting and then moderators start to fail at doing their job which is protecting the community, this turned into a lot of fussing among the forums, good members complaining about the rules not being followed, bad members saying the good members didn't know what they were talking about.

Plainly speaking hostile environments aren't the best places to attract new members, it scares them away, cause two people fighting in a thread isn't discussion cause it isn't going anywhere. Basically the old members got tired of this cause they were of the older and more mature group, I know cause I for the most part discussed games and life outside of the forums with them and asked them why they wanted to leave. Then all of this was reinforced once VGC "hit it big" meaning the internet trolls that terrorize awful communities like N4G, Gamespot, and IGN started to notice VGC as well, and well with an already conflicted community, moderation having issues, and fights happening all the time in the forums, it was rather easy for them to just walk right in and start growing in number and call themselves productive members, this perpetuated things more where older members started to drop like flies or relegate themselves to certain forums usually off topic like kzasz cause they were tired of trying to make a logical point and it just turn into a fight, and I felt their pain cause they were the reason I came here.

Then the site change came, it knocked out a lot of the trolls unknowingly cause they couldn't post unless it was from a computer, but as MM has said it's not great for lurkers, and it really isn't IGN had the same issue with their site changes and their popularity has dropped as well. Basically the site design needs to be very open and casual friendly