Yet another reviving Zel thread

I know I haven't posted regularly in a while, but it's still sad for me to see how far this place has fallen. We were a huge board. We have over 47,000 members with 105 members that have over 1000 posts, almost 600,000 total posts, and over 42,000 threads. Today, based on the stats there are only nine semi-active members. That's not insignificant, and if we work together this board can grow again. Hell, major businesses have started with less people than that. However there are several factors to address and several questions to answer before action should be taken.

First of all, we need to know what caused this board to crash. My feeling is that we failed to evolve with the changing times. The forum cannot last as a Diablo II forum in 2015. I was really hoping that the World of Warcraft guild would revitalize this forum, however the schism about which server to play on killed us, and rather than revitalize this forum, WoW stole members from this forum who created their own little community separate from Zelaron. Anyway, we need to rebrand.

A forum cannot survive on idle chit-chat. We need to focus on our core and spit out as much content related to that as possible. Zelaron was initially created as a gaming forum. I assume we want to keep it that way. So the first question is, do any of you active members still game? If we can get some relevant gaming content here perhaps this will attract some people. I also think debate topics are good, as people tend to get attracted to those. So if people will dedicate some time to posting a thread or two a day, I think that could help the activity of this place, and those few who stumble across this place might be more easily convinced to stay if they see this place as active.

Secondly, it would be nice if Chruser told us how this place became big in the first place. Perhaps we could recreate something like that.

Would it be possible to send out a mass email to members of old? I'm sure some would see it.

Finally, we need to discuss what the best strategy to get the word out would be. But, ultimately, I think it comes down to having good content first before putting the word out.

If some of you gamers could recruit people from your respective games that would probably be beneficial. Starting a clan of some sort and recruiting that way would be useful. Anyone thinking about playing any upcoming games?