Make FF Great again! Ideas and suggestions to increase forum activity

[TLO]

Just now, CWood21 said:

I can't say I totally disagree.  The baseball forum has more posts than all but four team forums.  If you break up that by even 3 (assuming every proposed baseball subforum was created), each baseball subforum would have less posts than 16 team subforums.  At the very least, there needs to be expansion of posts outside of team threads and GDT and the other usual standards.

True. TBH, I think there needs to be an expansion of posts in terms of new threads regardless of the subforum. For example, I'm always down to here cool new prospect news/discussion, but I don't wanna have to go through one giant catch all thread to find something that is interesting. Again, I think that speaks to a forum wide issue. Sort of the same thing that happened in TAST. Back in the TAST prime (i say that is circa 2013), there was the catch all WAYTA that was good, but there was a steady flow of solid new threads and cool discussions going on. Then everything eventually just kinda merged into WAYTA as we lost members, which greenie made a good point about regarding the age of the active posters. All of us that posted consistently back then have all simply gotten older and busier. So collectively everyone is on less, and when we do check it, there's naturally less discussion going on, and thus less of a desire to engage. 

[CWood21]

3 minutes ago, NewAge said:

Yeah like as it is now, interesting threads about say the juiced ball, or the White Sox farm system, or July 2nd will pretty quickly get pushed off by a bunch of team threads than most people don't care about. 

Honestly, I'd really only say that five team threads are what I'd consider active.  You've got the Brewers, Cubs, Cardinals, Braves and Astros fans that are consistently keeping their team threads at the top.

[TLO]

4 minutes ago, NewAge said:

Yeah like as it is now, interesting threads about say the juiced ball, or the White Sox farm system, or July 2nd will pretty quickly get pushed off by a bunch of team threads than most people don't care about. 

Yeah it's a catch 22 so to speak. It's either that, or the discussion will start to happen in one of the larger threads, and get buried by another topic. 

[CWood21]

Just now, thelawoffices said:

True. TBH, I think there needs to be an expansion of posts in terms of new threads regardless of the subforum. For example, I'm always down to here cool new prospect news/discussion, but I don't wanna have to go through one giant catch all thread to find something that is interesting. Again, I think that speaks to a forum wide issue. Sort of the same thing that happened in TAST. Back in the TAST prime (i say that is circa 2013), there was the catch all WAYTA that was good, but there was a steady flow of solid new threads and cool discussions going on. Then everything eventually just kinda merged into WAYTA as we lost members, which greenie made a good point about regarding the age of the active posters. All of us that posted consistently back then have all simply gotten older and busier. So collectively everyone is on less, and when we do check it, there's naturally less discussion going on, and thus less of a desire to engage. 

And I think that's what Webby is going with these "catch all" threads discussion is that everyone (mods included) need to do a better job of promoting discussion rather than trying to "clean up" the forum with these "catch all" threads.

[NewAge]

12 minutes ago, NewAge said:

Just the fact that the other sports forums expanding could be enough to draw in a significant number of posters who previously only used this site to post on Sundays during football season. 

Want to reiterate that this is probably the biggest argument in favor of having the three forums. 

[NewAge]

2 minutes ago, thelawoffices said:

Yeah it's a catch 22 so to speak. It's either that, or the discussion will start to happen in one of the larger threads, and get buried by another topic. 

Yeah, I mean if you're going to have a lot of threads, it makes sense to divide up the forums. It gives you a chance to sort through the categories of threads you want to see. If you don't care about the draft or prospects at all, you can just view the threads about the general MLB. If you just throw them all in one, there's a desire to just post in a single thread about a topic (like prospects) rather than a whole forum with a variety of threads about that general topic. 

[NewAge]

What do you think @Webmaster?

[Mr. bDoDDleS]

I think a @FootballsFuture Twitter is a great idea. If you have the right, social media savvy person helping you run it, it could be a big boost to the site. 

TBH one of the main reasons I didn't post as much, not sure if this affected others was the massive post threads that seemed to incorporate all the talk in the specific forums. So it seemed like a daunting task to go through a 20-page thread to see if what you're feeling was already discussed or not. So I just stayed out of that. 

 

[pwny]

The baseball forum needs to show that it can drive content as is before the splitting of the subforum happens. We've tried splitting subforums because people argued it would create more content and every single time it's failed and actually decreased activity. I've seen it in every forum I've ever been on. It's a death kill across the entire internet to split forums because "we totally could get more content if we did."

 

The only time it works is when the content has already proven to justify the expansion. Because the majority of the time, content doesn't get driven how members think it does. You have all these thread ideas. Make them now. Show they can drive content amongst the current baseball group and pull more people in. If people are interested in discussing the content, a few active team threads isn't going to get in the way of that. The soccer fans did it in Other Sports even fighting for space against not only specific teams, leagues and other threads, but fighting against hockey, boxing, MMA, and wrestling as well. If they can do it there and drive activity, if these ideas are viable, you can do it amongst some team threads. At that point, it'd be worth looking into. Before proving that though, you've got a much bigger chance of killing activity in baseball than you do increasing it if you split. 

 

EDIT: Reddit can't even support a separate baseball prospects forum. Not sure how we would be able to.

[pwny]

Anyone remember the Packers Mock Draft subforum?

[Mr. bDoDDleS]

TBH being able to make similar threads about one subject like (MLB prospects) would be helpful with some of it, instead of just posting all in one there where you randomly post about a prospect. Same thing can be said with other forums.

I remember going to one sub forum and there was nothing but 1 huge thread.

[ramssuperbowl99]

 

5 hours ago, thelawoffices said:

I like where this idea comes from and the intention behind it, but I think it's too much. Too many sub-forums is going to lead to a more cluttered look and  hurt the aesthetic appeal of the site. I think the baseball forum just needs to have more threads created, mainly because I think it is sort of falling into the same pit that was already mentioned where there are too many catch all threads. That, I think, leads to burying productive discussion that could be going on. So something like "Do the White Sox have the best farm system of the past decade?" should be it's own thread, not something just buried in a general prospects thread.

Agreed. @Greenie's setting up infrastructure before the content is there instead of letting the content drive the infrastructure. Let's get more topics set up and then talk about the site functionality.

And getting more topics set up, especially if this is a new initiative where we have to break old patterns, can come from mods as well as posters. If a topic is getting off course, split it out and try to set a standard for when something requires it's own topic so that posters start to pick up on it.

[ramssuperbowl99]

7 hours ago, NewAge said:

Not to mention, people like myself and @ramssuperbowl99 can post threads that can introduce other members to aspects of the game, such as specific sabermetrics concepts. 

The high level view of this is "how can FF best promote good content?" That doesn't have to be limited to baseball posts or nerd stuff. Have some vets in the NFL Draft forum post a "how to scout OL" thread with film to back it up. NFL Gen could have an in depth discussion of certain offensive/defensive schemes with film-based examples. 

People crave that kind of content, because FF caters to the type of football fan who's "dream job" would be NFL GM. I said this before, but FF should be looking to take traffic from Walterfootball, which is a horrible site run by some dude who doesn't have the faintest idea of what he's talking about, but gets hits because he attempts to talk about that kind of stuff. If it was done better, and done in a way where the reader could at least try to develop their own skillset of football analysis, people would engage with it.

The badges are a good way to help promote that. Twitter could help promote that. There are other ways too, but that should be the long term goal IMO.

[cddolphin]

6 hours ago, Mr. bDoDDleS said:

I think a @FootballsFuture Twitter is a great idea. If you have the right, social media savvy person helping you run it, it could be a big boost to the site. 

TBH one of the main reasons I didn't post as much, not sure if this affected others was the massive post threads that seemed to incorporate all the talk in the specific forums. So it seemed like a daunting task to go through a 20-page thread to see if what you're feeling was already discussed or not. So I just stayed out of that. 

 

I think this is a great idea.

I could understand the hesitance to associate with twitter on the old forum, since it was essentially unusable on mobile and it would only serve to siphon users. But with the new mobile app, it becomes so easy to post threads on twitter and spread access to the forum through the twitter userbase. For example, it would be really cool if I could tweet out a cool Dolphins Mock Offseason to my Dolphins fans "friends" on twitter, and that would bring more users to the site. Plenty would come, and some would undoubtedly stay for the longer-form discussions.

Now that the site is mobile-friendly, it seems a great idea to embrace it. Facebook / instagram doesn't shy away from allowing easy linking with other social media sites, and twitter has a HUGE untapped Dolphins fan base. If even 5% of that fanbase started visiting FF regularly, even if mostly through the mobile app, it would be a boon.

The only issue is some twitter users have personal photos / names etc, but I don't think that should prevent progress. Tweaking to the rules could be conceivably done, "no personal info on this site, off-site profiles won't be policed". It would require a tiny bit more moderating but there were dozens of great threads I would have gladly shared on twitter, and there is regular content on this site that is high-quality enough that it would/should garner significant attention.

 

An official FF account which all moderators could have access to, to interact and share content with twitter, is a fantastic idea.

[pwny]

2 hours ago, ramssuperbowl99 said:

If a topic is getting off course, split it out and try to set a standard for when something requires it's own topic so that posters start to pick up on it.

This is absolutely something we've been preaching across the forum. Mods have got to do a better job of watching this. We have the tools to split threads out and make content into new threads.