3 replies to this topic

[KaizenNeko]

Okay, I don't know how much of you know by now I'm divorcing my own site from Black Blade but I have every intention of keeping the ol' ebony stabbity thing alive. But AS WHAT is the question I'm wrestling with.

I'm kind of lamenting being "The BOTP place" at this point. It seems like most of the old-age and middle-age people are going to be gone for good. I would like to shift the focus away from BOTP and back to where I had intended as a community site for weird folks like us. Ya know, the literary, artsy, anime, gaming geeks. See there's a problem. It's hard to keep a focus on such a large target demographic.

I've run through several ideas through my head these past few years, but each I for some reason or another have evaded or just haven't bothered implementing. So I'm going to tell you what plans I came up with (list may be expanded as I remember some ideas) and then turn the floor over to you.

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Literary Community
This idea had me setting up a wiki which people could use to post stories and other stuff. This was an idea spawned during the turmoil of BOTP7. I probably mentioned trying it a few times. I'm not really sure what it spurred it, but it seemed like an alternative to a BBS that would be a ton simpler to use from a user standpoint.

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Art Community
Kind of spurred by DeviantArt, but with less emphasis on Naruto and Sonic. We had something like this a while back when the site was using a NUKE-based CMS with the gallery. But then I though not many of us actually used that to begin with and it was used more of a ImageShack type of thing.

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Hybrid Art/Literary Community
This is what we sort of are anyway, but the idea was to streamline it more. I just don't know how the hell HOW that would have come about.

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Some kind of Blogazine?
I keep having this idea of a blog-based magazine which has us members as contributers. Yeah, I'm just as confused as you are as to what the hell I was brewing up with this idea.

[Sasuke1986]

Hybrid Art/Literary Community's been appealing to me, though I do miss the gallery function from the old NUKE-based site.

In any case, for this to really blossom there'd need to be an increase in users, user activity, and contributions, I wanna say. Regardless, this would definitely be an excuse for me to get more active with drawing and writing.

[KaizenNeko]

The thing is I've really been hesitant to start promoting the site until there was a clear focus for it. I've been looking at a new CMS solution in Drupal but really haven't played with it much.

[InsaneSpaceHunter]

As I myself have slightly less artistic ability than your average rabid weasel (who might at least slobber in an aesthetically pleasing pattern as he chews on your extremities), my focus would obviously be more on the 'literary community' part and the general craic. That being said, however, I *do* like to look at the pretty pictures that other people can make. :P

As I remember, there was a *little* art critique thing going on when we had the image hosting dealie; some people did indeed just toss images on there like they would with ImageShack, but there *was* some legitimate action going on. I think it might be a good thing to bring back in some form. Especially for you artsy-fartsy types that keep everything going. ;)

In any event, something that would benefit our community as a whole would be to attract more people to it--we have a few new faces now and then, but for the most part, it's still just the "BOTP crowd" that hangs around the board. Not that it's a bad thing that we've managed to stick around this long, it's just that we're largely the only ones that DO. :P It's entirely possible that we're very hard to put up with and new users get scared away by our rampant personality clashes and heated arguments that old friends are wont to incite, but we just don't *attract* much in the way of new faces.

Again, I realize why we don't, say, advertise (at least, why we don't do it yet), but I think we'd have a better grasp on what people other than us would be interested in if we had people other than us. :P We're all largely here for the art & literary communities, because we're the ones who started them.

...well, that rambled on more than I expected, but I think I said what I tried to say. No guarantees, though. :P
Have a nice day!
The Insane Space Hunter