Zelaron needs changes

I've made threads like this before, and I'm going to do it again. Guys, I honestly believe that this place is really dying. If we continue at our current rate, come 2006, Zelaron will be nothing but merely a shadow of its previous self. For those of you who don't give a fuck, please politely stay out of this thread, but for those of you who do, I hope you're beginning to see it as a serious problem. The activity level on the boards is probably a fifth of what it was a year ago. The staff, while still here, is hardly active. The rules, albeit not so bad on closing threads and such as they have been before, seem to get more absurd every day. Earlier on in this forum's life, I used to enjoy flaming twits who'd come up here strictly to spam, but on the contrary, now I welcome it as some sort of new activity for the board. I highly doubt that's what Chruser intended for this board. At one point, this board probably had a 100 active members at any given point, and probably a few hundred, if not a thousand posts a day. Now the activity on Zelaron is 1/5 of that. My favorite forum, the flame forum, is dead. The old members have run out of stuff to talk about, and the new members aren't coming. Yesterday was the most active I have seen this board in a long time, due to the Superbowl, and it was nothing compared to an average day at this time of the year in 2004. Chruser had made this place into a thriving community; now it seems like this place is soon headed for its death.

A couple of days ago, Chruser replied to a thread I made which asked who ran Zelaron, and said that he and WetWired still seriously care about this place, and if anyone had any good suggestions that Chruser and WetWired would still listen to them, and perhaps implement them. Try as I may, I've had no indication that anything I've tried to get through to the admins has even had any consideration. I tried to get some sensible admin to listen and do away with the 7 character rule. Nobody listened. I tried to get an admin to bring back the stats. Nobody listened. I asked for the thread view bug to be fixed. Nobody listened. I'm sick and fucking tired of trying to get people to listen. Either at least consider what I'm saying, or make me an admin and let me do it myself, and as a side-note to those of you who think that I'm just saying that because I want to be admin, fuck you. A year ago, yes, I would've loved to be an admin or a mod, but what am I going to do modding a dying forum. The only reason I'd want to be an admin is to remove some of these crazy rules, and bring VBStats back, and make a few improvements which I think might help the Zelaron community to be more active, because lets face it, spam isn't the main problem here anymore, it's inactivity. Many people claimed that Zelaron was inactive because it was the holiday season, or because of midterms, but that clearly isn't the case. I would use whatever powers I have now, and post more news to improve the quality of Zelaron, but the problem with that is that there will be nobody to read it. I've tried to make this forum better. I tried with KoZ. I tried with my C tutorial. Those seem to have failed, but I'm not ready to give up on the forum.

I'm going to try this one more time. I have a few suggestions, some of them might be decent. The first, and foremost problem is inactivity. My solution for this is to bring in new members. Chruser, I don't know what you did the first time, but whatever it was that you did, do it again. I'm begging you. Last time we used Diablo II as a means for attracting new members. Lets do the same with WoW. Lets advertise WoW, and see if we can get members to join. Another thing that will help the problem of inactivity -- have more moderators for individual forums, and make it their responsibility to get activity for that forum. If they're not doing it, either remove the forum altogether, or remove them as mods. That'll be motivation to get them to do it. I remember back in the day when there was a moderator for almost every single forum on this board, but the problem with that is, if we did it today, almost every single one of our active members would become moderators. Still, it's a thought that might be possible. I know that you've all had forum leader meeting in the past. Well, perhaps it's time to get those back.

All this talk of forum leaders gets me to another one of my complaints -- have more active staff. That would seriously help. If the staff was active, we'd at least know that there is going to be some activity. As of now, there's a lot of staff that's inactive. That serves absolutely no purpose. Why not reward the more active members with a staff spot, and remove some of the people who aren't doing anything at all? As I said above, you could really use that to your advantage. Anyone who's high enough to be a staff member should take a certain amount of pride in making this forum better. I suggest we have more active mods. There's still a wide variety of members to choose from. If you do decide to take up this suggestion, and decide to consider me as a possible member for staff, I don't want any part of it unless someone above me is willing to try with me. In fact, if you guys aren't going to make any changes whatsoever, please remove my News Poster title. If the admins aren't going to do anything about the current conditions, then I've given up hope. There's not much I can do, and I don't want to post news for an inactive forum. On the other hand, if you do decide to try and make some changes for the better, I'd be very much obliged and I'd take any spot you wanted me to, or simply restart posting news quite happily.

Next improvement: bring back the VBStats. I've said it in previous threads, and when VB2 was around, I loved VBStats. I used to check those things daily. It made coming here so much more fun. Now, I know WW's main complaint against this is that it has everything to do with post count. Now, that's a valid complaint from his perspective, but WW, you have to realize that a lot of members here do] care about post count. In some way or the other, it shows senority, it brings a little competition to the forum, and it encourages more posts. You claim that post count encourages spam, but that's not really true. Since you have made your changes, has spam really been cut down? Well, sure, but at the price of 4/5 of our members? Have the conversations gotten more intelectual? No, they've stayed more or less the same, except the number of conversations are just getting less and less because of the absurdity of some of these rules, and the dullness that they bring about. This is a predominantly teenage forum, WW. Quit trying to change it from that.

This next rule that I would like removed pretty much goes with the above paragraph. I know I pester you about this all the time, but remove the seven character rule. Again, you claim that it cuts down on spam. It doesn't, and at this point, I'd even welcome spam to the boards. People can very easily get around the seven character rule by adding a few random characters, so the whole purpose of that is defeated. Ever since the time you implemented the seven character rule, I haven't really seen any cut back in spam in proportion with Zelaron's active members. It's just a nuissance; get rid of it once and for all. I mean, you know that it's already driven off at least one possible new member. I've given you the link to that. Just do away with any rules that dictate how members should post. The whole anti-all caps rule should be done away with as well. There's plenty of times people might need to post in all caps to express something. For instance, lets say you say something I don't like, and I'm trying to be sarcastic. A reply such as this:

HEATHEN!!!

is a lot more effective than something like this:

heathen

Another thing that I was slightly astonished by was WW placing Slaynish involuntarily in the no post-count group because he decided to tell people that he finally got 4000 posts. That shouldn't even be an option, man. I don't care if you're Chruser, or the president himself, that's just an abuse of power. I would never even think about joining a forum if I knew it punished its members for posting. And why do you alienate yourself from other members anyway? If they make a reasonable request, such as a name-change, as I have, what's the point, or logic in denying them that?

I've really run out of time, at the moment, but I really think that covers most of my major complaints for now. Now, mods, and sup mods, don't take offense at this. This is aimed at the admins, really. I know there's not too much the mods or sup mods can do with this, as their power is only to enforce the rules. I do hope, though, that someone takes this seriously, and at least tries to revive this place. I don't know how much longer I can take clicking the new posts button constantly and having it not bring up anything.