The politics issue has been mostly taken care of. There were a lot of toxic users of a right wing mindset in the past, and a lot of them left, while others mostly stopped commenting once a Democratic discussion was created where they weren't allowed to provoke people, and a single Politics thread absorbed most of the Trump talk and culture war clickbait discussions. In the meantime they'd already scared off a lot of left leaning users, including some that were good contributors to on-topic discussions. I think the bleeding has stopped though.

That said making certain forums opt-in might be a good idea, so long as it was easy enough to find a tutorial for how to customize the site. The way I seem to just stumble upon features that existed for free users for years makes me worry for new users. I think a well updated and visible tutorial page would be useful, probably even to longtime users for certain things.

Now with all THAT said, it's been discussed many times in this thread that the mobile experience is the bulk of the issue, and anything else we come up with to improve the place will only have a marginal effect in comparison.

Surprisingly, this was a pretty good month for VGC: 12.7K posts and 18.6% month to month growth. We ought to keep it up!

I posted it a few times, but I figured there was not much of a point since the slump was that hard.

It's starting to look like things have leveled out. Hopefully that stays true and maybe we can start to rebuild.

I just wanted to say that, I think one of the main problem with this site is the way articles are organized and presented. There are great articles on vgchartz, but these well written articles tend to get buried quickly by a mass of junk filler articles. I understand that short two paragraph news articles also help drive traffic to the site, but the more substantial articles need better visibility. If an official writer takes the time to write up a six or seven paragraph article, such as a game review, it should be visible on the front page of the site for at least a month. What is happening right now though, is that those articles tend to get buried in a week or less. After they get buried the only way to find those longer articles is to make two or three clicks into the site, which most users just won't bother with. For example: How many of you managed to see this review? http://www.vgchartz.com/article/442143/grayland-pc/ I didn't. It was taken off the front page so fast, that I never knew it existed until I manually went into the all articles section. And I only did that to prove a point in this post.

I think the solution to this is to emulate the way Destructoid handles larger and smaller articles. Things like reviews, or popular articles automatically tend to get bumped up. Or they get their own space outside of the normal article feed. Vgchartz already has that in a way.

For example: You can see here that there are three big articles with their own space on the site. They are the Ys review, the Top 50 Games article, and the YoY Sales article. This is great, but I think it needs to be expanded. I think instead of having one article with a large picture (Ys Review in this case), followed by two other articles with a smaller picture, it should be expanded so that we get one article with a large picture and 8-10 articles with the smaller pictures, like the Top 50 Games article.

What I'm basically saying here is that the "latest stories" section of the site is overcrowding the more substantial articles.

Another good solution to this would be implementing a system that bumps articles based on how many views or how many comments they have. If an article doesn't have very many views or comments, then it should die for being a poorly written phoned in article, same as any bad thread in these forums.

Oh, and finally I think Zergnet just has to go. It used to be an interesting way to find good gaming sites, but over the past few years it has devolved into clickbait.

Edit: Changed some things, because I realized that articles weren't getting buried quite as quickly as I thought.

I think there's a good point here about the articles. Building on your idea of separate spaces, it might be nice to have spaces just for reviews and previews, that displayed, say, the last 5 review/preview articles, a similar space for sales charts (YoY and weekly hardware/software data go here), a similar space for comparison charts ("X vs. Y in Z region" articles go here), another for news, another for the original content our writers produce (non-chart, non-review, non-news articles, these are fewer and farther between but take more work so deserve to remain visible for longer). Then have the header of each section link to the articles section, filtered by the appropriate category.

This would benefit all users, but especially those that don't visit every day. News alone can push everything else off in a day or two on a busy news day. It would also ensure that any visitor got a glimpse of a variety of different content the site has to offer. Anyone partial to a particular category could easily keep up with what they're most interested in. Plus I just think it would just be a more pleasant way to organize the content, more satisfying to browse, a nice quality of life improvement even if you read it all and check the site regularly.

Letting posts like this stand without any consequences is one of the reasons that i am losing interest

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9105812

There's a reason why I changed my settings ages ago so that politics threads don't show up on the front page unless I take part in them. 

I haven't done these in a couple months. Completely forgot.

Activity is still trending up, so there's that.

Darn it. Beat me to it.