Future Direction of the Forums?

[[XC] Lead Head]

I'm sorry Charles, but we absolutely need open registration. Lots of unique page views are great for advertising revenue, but mean nothing about forum health. "Returning members" means absolutely nothing if they aren't consistently posting.

There are 27 members on-line right now. At 7PM EST. This should be prime-time for forum activity, there should be hundreds of users online right now. There are 27 - out of 121,000 users. Other competing tech forums have anywhere from 200-500 users active at any one time. I'm on two other extremely niche forums; one deals with antique farm equipment that currently has 98 users online (out of a userbase with an average age of 50 years old). The other one is one that deals in lawn equipment - and it has over 800 users active right now.

None of these forums charge a registration fee. Infact, no forum I've ever used required a fee. I can tell you that I would immediately pass on any forum that required any kind of fee. Install recaptcha, and implement a sign up question and that will take care of 99% of your spammer problem.

Next, I full agree with the "culling" needed. I agree with every single one of Serra's suggestions for which forums need to be consolidated or removed entirely. With a small active userbase, you need to keep the forum small and concise to keep activity in any given section up.

I've seen many forums die, and without drastic changes XS will be soon to followI recommend you follow all of Serra's advice to a T.