I'm definitely not interested in having people -specifically- from DA, or a bunch of pokekids swarming the forums. The community here seems like it's pretty good at the moment, if small.
If it were up to me, I'd drop the Zelda Fan Game Central name and just keep it as ZFGC with no meaning, shift the focus a little bit. Plus all that other stuff that we suggested back. I'd still like to see a merge with GDU, which I think would be nice, no matter who's running it. >_>
Indeed.. I think we'll always be a Zelda forum in spirit, since that seems to be the one single, unifying interest that all members of this board share, to some degree. We'll also need to retain the (Fan)Game-development aspect, otherwise we would just become another Zelda forum and new members would be even less interested.
How about starting to report on News across the gaming community, with a strong focus on Zelda and indie content? We'd maintain our focus, and people would have another reason to visit the site if they weren't immediately interested in posting on the forum. They'd come for the content, eventually check out the forums, and with any luck try it out.
Then there's the question of "What would make our News blog any more interesting than any other?". I think it come down to style. We could post video reviews on fan games that come out, with humorous (but light-hearted) critique from the members of the forum. We could also incorporate humor into our text news / reviews. Humor finds a larger audience than just plain old news, the people who want that would visit the larger, commercial sites. As well, the humor would attract a friendlier crowd, rather than just somebody who signed up to tell us how much our opinion sucked.
It also appears to me that our forum is greatly overstaffed. 50% of the active members are Mods or Admins. The issue with this, is that, for one it's unnecessary, the forum in it's current state requires very minimal moderation. The second, is that to a newcomer, a Staff member might not seem very approachable, even intimidating. When half of the active posters are in a position of authority, people might be scared to reply. It could appear to them that this is a very tight-knit group of friends who aren't interested in outsiders or newcomers. A new poster will be more inclined to give feedback to another member, rather than a staff member if they think they might be easily punished by such a large force of Mods.
Obviously, our staff as far as Administation and Moderation is filled quite nicely. But, I would be more than happy to provide my services to the forum in some other way. I could help our blog if need be.
I'm also quite adequate with Tech issues, I'm starting school in September in a course for System Administration, though my true passion lies in repairing PC hardware / software, as well as diagnosing general, moderate issues.
I'm just spitting out ideas as they come. The more ideas we can come up with, the better.
I do care about ZFGC even though at times I may not show it, but seeing the place as it is, really sucks, and even if things are difficult, it would be nice for a change.
I returned mostly out of nostalgia. I wanted to see how many old veterans remained here, I expected mostly "Who are you?" replies, what I got was a pretty positive response. I was worried that people would remember me poorly, as I wasn't always the best person (in fact I was a complete shitter for a while there). There's obviously deeply embedded camaraderie and memories in everybody who remains here. We're hanging onto that relic of our past, the glory days of ZFGC when our forum was thriving with activity and culture. I just will not accept "The forum is slowly dying, accept it", without a fight. Maybe it's in vain, but I'm willing to give it one last try to breathe some life into this place. It'll be a sad day when I type "
www.ZFGC.com" into my browser, and get a 404 message.
I think we can pull a few more glorious years out of our asses, if we play our cards right.
