I have been thinking a lot about this site over the last week and ways in which I can bring in new members and build the community.
There is still a lot of work to be done moving topics over from the old board, but there's no rush for that I guess. We are lucky that we have a nice bunch of people here that are willing to share their source and thoughts, for that I thanks every single one of you.
There is a lot of work that needs to go into a forum if it is to be sucessful, especially for something with a small niche like demo coding, topics need to be kept fresh and there are more languages here than we had at the old board, some of which I have no clue how to use (yet!!). I'm just so thankful that there are nice people here who are helping out the community.
As far as the board goes, I provide the hosting and I try to take as much interest in peoples projects as I possibly can, but anyway, here's what I've been thinking.
A demo consists of other things than code, there is artwork, music and design that goes into making a prod.
I wondered whether there would be any call for a music forum and an art forum.
Artists and musicians could use the file attachment facility of the board to share their stuff that they want to have used in demos.
The other things are that this forum, while although friendly has no real dedicated place for new members to post and say hello. Perhaps an introductions board?
The forum allows you to collapse categories that you are not interested in so there need not be any need for them to get in the way.
Another thing is links.
I wanted to discourage the posting of links here, this was because I thought to myself that it was impossible to check the content of sites being linked to and also from a couple of bad experiences while we were on the other board.
This makes me a hypocrite because I have no qualms in spamming DBF stuff all over places like Coders Workshop.
Perhaps a links forum for people who want to post links to their own places and sites that would be of help to the community.
I'd feel a lot happier about the situation here if I could do that.
Although I pay for the site it would be no good if I was the only person here and I need your feedback before I go making sweeping changes.
Just to give you all an update, I've been ruthlessly submitting the site to search engines, we should start getting crawled over by the web bots before long (goodbye bandwidth!).
Seriously though, any thoughts are greatly appreciated. Please don't PM them to me, just post them here so that everyone can discuss.
Thanks.