I’ve never been a particularly active poster (~1000 posts in 25 years) but I have long periods of lurking interspersed. It was brilliant! I discovered the SDMB on AOL a little while later. It was in the free arts newspaper (the one that wasn’t the Village Voice). I discovered the Straight Dope column when I moved to New York in 1994. I’ve thought long and hard about how to change that. We are not shrinking but we are not growing either. Our demographic is about the same as SDMB. Hat 2 is that of an admin for another message board.Hat 1 is that of a long-time member, occasional poster.I’d be happy to contribute to support the message board but the last thing I want is to lord it over others that I’m a “Member” while they are a peon. Once we add “Celebrity Death Pool Winner,” it feels like a club where I wasn’t invited and I don’t get the in jokes. Once we start adding “Members” and “Charter Members,” it starts feeling like some people get to go behind the velvet rope where newcomers aren’t welcome. I get that there are moderators and others, which is a distinction I’m happy with. I’ve never signed up a Member because, honestly, I’d rather just have a board where people are mostly equal. Are we sustainable with a couple thousand active members? What is the minimum viable user base? What does Sun Times want out of the board? Do they expect the boards to drive traffic to their site? I don’t think that happens today, but if it did, would they be wiling to put money back into the board? Would they be willing to sell it the users who are here now, who could operate it as a non-profit? Or to a single user who is willing to put a little time and money into it to see it it could be a sustainable business again? What intellectual property could come with it? The message board archives are a minimum, but what about the column archives? Do they still drive traffic to the boards? What about the “Straight Dope” trademark? The “Cecil Adams” trademark? TPTB should set goals for what they want out of the board. We should target goals for new signups and retention of active users to grow at some realistic rate. Repeat for a few threads each month and build a bigger user base of people with something to contribute. If we got two or three new people on board who say, “I know that!” we’re getting somewhere. If we were inclined, the social media outreach person could push that question out to HR professionals through ads on LinkedIn or Facebook. I just bumped thread on using personality tests to screen new hires. I’m, not an expert in social media marketing but it seems like we have some active threads on interesting topics from time to time. We could advertise through social media to target the types of people we want on the board. We could certainly be more welcoming of newbies once they get here. I have no particular interest in Facebook tracking everything I do. One factor that helps keep me on the site is that I can be anonymous. Whether this would be worth the effort might depend on an analysis of what articles still drive traffic to the site. The archives should also be populated with links to the related discussion pages so people who find the articles through Google can also learn more or add to the discussion on the boards. Each new column could come with a baked-in link to the board discussion about the column although if there aren’t enough regulars to feed the column discussion, that won’t do a good job of attracting newbies. Maybe they would be happy with a deal where “Cecil Adams” gave them a viable column each week and we got at least a few clicks from new readers to the homepage. Ideally, you could get some organic traffic from links by other news sources that attract the types of thinking readers we want. You would need a writer or writers with some interesting perspective writing about topics people want to discuss. If someone were to resurrect the column, online only, it might drive people back to the site. I found the boards through the Straight Dope column in my local alt weekly, which has since gone bankrupt several times.
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