Okay, I'll pitch some things that could, maybe, work:
- I don't really know much how you could improve the thoughtfulness of discussion; sure, serious non-pokemon threads will attract only serious discussion, but judging by existing (and already pokemon-related) threads, there is a very hard limit to that; without more mature and active people, that won't ever improve. Maybe the site itself could work out a less PG-13 image? I'm not saying to make it black, add blood dripping to the frames of the posts and remove the PG-13 restrictions of the forum, but making it less alienating to people who will be put off by that; it's like the anime: right now, the site is analogous to the eternal ash-is-a-dumb-10-year-old anime; make it Generations.
- I'll leave the VG and ruins of alph suggestions to someone more capable, but you may want to try to offer something smogon and serebii don't.
- An interesting thing is, as far as I know (someone correct me, please), pokebeach is more or less the only large forum where fake cards have a place; sure, there's the deviantart group, but it's not the same, is it? So that's definitely something it could take advantage from. So bringing CaC back is one thing, with front page publicity. I know, the problem is judging; I don't know how it could work without an expert to point out mistakes; maybe have people, both participants and not (that second part should be tested at best; there's lots of... ahem, out there) to anonymously submit votes and/or suggestions? or through likes, and the corrections are not anonymous? But that's just supposed to be the starting point; the ideal would always be to have all fake cards as images. Text is a good entry point, but... it's easy; anyone can do it, in very little time; there's no comparison between lines of text and a full image of what you made, and that should be encouraged; the resources, as they're now, can be advertised alongside the CAC; similarly, image should have more weight than text... in whatever terms you choose to define that. But, the CaC should walk a fine line; you don't want to discourage people either; it's a foregone conclusion that a novice image faker against, say, BBninjas or Jabberwock (or a text faker against good, experienced text fakers) would lose by a landslide, and that doesn't feel good; tiers could be implemented, perhaps, to avoid that kind of intimidation?
- Another strategy can be to showcase each week, say, an image card, a fakemon, a text collection (not individual text cards; the point is to not show whatever, but things that carry a meaning; otherwise, you're replicating the posting problem to the user production too), a picture from the art thread, etcetera, in the front page. The key to publicity and attracting people is the front page, there's no way around that; if you get people in one way, maybe they'll stick for something else, but if you get them in one of six different ways... well, I shouldn't have to explain this. To paraphrase John Berger, fascination is the point, along with the promise of "you're not this now... but you could be"; if they're sensitive to it and you show them an image card, you show them the tools through which they could also be on that space, now consecrated as "important"; if you show them a text collection, you also tell them where to show their own, with the implied promise of some day after they finish theirs, it could be there; if you show them art, maybe they have some of their own already, so they can be there, and so on and so on.
Now, all of this is very nice, but there's the most important question:
Does pokebeach want to change in this way?
I can't really answer that; the people who have posted in this thread are, comparatively, some of the oldest and more active people in here, so they don't seem a very representative sample of the site's new demographic; if you take a look at the "introduce yourself" thread, how many of those people do you see around every day, enough that you know who they are? it's also noticeable that most of them seem to come in here for the TCG (particularly asking one-off questions or for decklists and metagame discussion), and yes, that's because the site is focused on the TCG and we have no way to know how that would go if things were different; that's a fair point; but still, I'm sure that if it was a matter of simply pushing a button and triple the posting and signing up and audience for games and activities the site's authorities would do it... but would they see it as worth it if took more than that (as it probably will)? they chose the TCG direction for a reason, after all, and it seems to work, for good and bad.
I'm fairly sure that, at this point, if you took out thirty key people from the forums, general discussion, forum games, videogames (after the S&M hype dies), VCG and the artistic subforums would die for all intents and purposes; maybe with a post every two, three days by some random person who doesn't do much more than that. Where I'm going with this is: maybe that's not relevant for the overall plan; the renewal of this site was really ambitious, so it isn't surprising to see how it ended; maybe those subforums dying is only a natural consequence.
If it isn't intended or desired, well, here's this thread, full of feedback and suggestions; they can surely take something from here.
