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?

I think it comes down to SEO SEO SEO

The problem with forums nowadays is almost every other forum has more usability than Zelaron. I come here to talk to you guys on occasion.

With Reddit for example, I can share anything I want to and from that board. The layout is better, the subforums are a good idea. It's pretty similar to Zelaron, but Zelaron is still looking like a 2002 website. I know there are different themes, but it's not the same.

You can only optimize so many flame forum posts. I think what he's saying is there needs to be a new flow of content coming in to add expansive growth.


One way that would easily grow this site but nobody would agree to is losing anonymity. It's basically how people kept coming around, dat feeling of not knowing who you are (when in reality anyone with admin privileges has access to your IP).

We could make a ranked team in League of Legends, and have someone spectate with commentary. Even if we do awful, so long as the spectator makes fun of us, we'll become popular.

Trick2g got HUGELY famous just by making fun of noobs in ranked games.

We make part of the forums dedicated to it, add the team logo, name the team Zelaron, etc.

Placeholder text [lots to say but too busy to say it right now]

Looking forward to what you have to say, KA.

Chruser should pay us to post.

Meh, I think I thought I had a lot more to say than I really did.

Overall, I agree with you. I think you should make new threads to cover the other discussion points in your post, though. Most notably:

"we need to know what caused this board to crash." (thread for discussion of the demise)

"We need to focus on our core and spit out as much content related to that as possible." (thread for new content ideas)

"it would be nice if Chruser told us how this place became big in the first place/we need to discuss what the best strategy to get the word out would be" (thread for advertising ideas)

I would probably include a fourth thread which would be something along the lines of "Is it worth it?" because I'm not convinced it really is.

It also might be a good idea to do these in some sort of sequence. Maybe we make a thread for discussion of the demise of Zelaron, and then a week later we make a thread for brainstorming new content ideas, etc.

Someone does dramatic rereadings of classic threads (why not even a coalition rereading for the World Record Thread?) and posts them on youtube. Become partners. Make dough.

Maybe we should invade other message boards? It's a small army, but still.

Let's hope it's not one like ours, where it only has 10 members on a good day.

inb4 not your personal army.

if we want to make Zelaron big just make a stupid fucking meme site and host trending images with appropriate seo and hashtags.

What if we dedicated the entire website to the prey mantis meme?

That mantis was probably the most epic thing to happen at this site.

I'd love to see this site revitalized. Zelaron was great back when I first joined and I was to young to really appreciate it. I would love to see it pull back.

I think we were relying on d3 to be some uber epic game and everyone to come back for d3 content but blizz took to long to make it any good and no one plays it anymore.

The league idea is actually decently good. Or we could be all indie and go dota.

Playing to my strengths, we could make a competitive tf2 team. That game is huge and shows no sign of ever dying with its massive following.

Just my 2¢

Let's make a small 2d MMO based on that mantis, and make it P2W so this place will flood with fuckin' dialup weirdos.

Bacon pancakes.

If Zelaron starts serving bacon pancakes I'm never leaving.

I doubt you'll ever leave, even with the pancakes.

True.