Attracting new people

With all due respect, I think the non-commercial purpose stuff is something that you can't even believe it yourself.

Even if it were your hobby, you need some money to hold up this site. Have you ever thought about what you would do if this site gets more popular and you need to increase the bandwidth of the hosting service? As every site devoted to content, it's always possible to monetise it. But for that you need a bit of investment and time.

You've got to take it as a business anyways.

I'm sure others have suggested this elsewhere but I strongly believe that the first forfeit in any debate should garner an automatic loss- no voting, no waiting.   This would really process through a lot of debates with lower interest levels, experiments, absences, etc and help focus the audience on debates where both sides are engaged.  Yes, that means a much smaller set of debates running but I think it would increase the number of debates & interest in them over time.

I like the idea of weekly themes or key words to encourage people to talk about the same things.  The more topical the better.

I like the idea of more frequent, low value recognition:  have a thread where people nominate best forum topic & response  of the week/ best debate/ best RFD, etc.  Last week's winner chooses this week's winner, etc.  Something like this can get little support in the beginning but even if it's lame in the beginning it incentivizes good writing, research, and calls attention to posts that inspire the next week.  I think something like DDO's Olympics was a good idea but the timeframes were killing interest.  I think you're better off doing quick cycles with a few participants that might potentially grow over iteration.  

More women.  Ask more women about how to attract more women.  Women are the majority of society- no social activity can be said to be really buzzing without a lot on interest & content from and for women.  A site like might always be dude-heavy but if we want something interesting here, we need to be always trying to improve the ration of women to men.

If a category of forum or debate isn't getting a lot of love, axe it.  If a category is getting most of the attention, divide it.  Right now the cars forum has 5 topics and 42 posts.  Why not stick those threads under technology

Yes, you're interested or Yes, you want to keep the status quo?

If interested, get to work on that mission statement and think about what you want here for this site and what kind of folks you want to attract? For example, do you want to attract reasonable, logical and rationale people who will provide relatively intellectual debates?

No one can help you with this unless we know what you want.

I'm sure others have suggested this elsewhere but I strongly believe that the first forfeit in any debate should garner an automatic loss- no voting, no waiting.   This would really process through a lot of debates with lower interest levels, experiments, absences, etc and help focus the audience on debates where both sides are engaged.  Yes, that means a much smaller set of debates running but I think it would increase the number of debates & interest in them over time.

I like the idea of weekly themes or key words to encourage people to talk about the same things.  The more topical the better.

I like the idea of more frequent, low value recognition:  have a thread where people nominate best forum topic & response  of the week/ best debate/ best RFD, etc.  Last week's winner chooses this week's winner, etc.  Something like this can get little support in the beginning but even if it's lame in the beginning it incentivizes good writing, research, and calls attention to posts that inspire the next week.  I think something like DDO's Olympics was a good idea but the timeframes were killing interest.  I think you're better off doing quick cycles with a few participants that might potentially grow over iteration.  

More women.  Ask more women about how to attract more women.  Women are the majority of society- no social activity can be said to be really buzzing without a lot on interest & content from and for women.  A site like might always be dude-heavy but if we want something interesting here, we need to be always trying to improve the ration of women to men.

If a category of forum or debate isn't getting a lot of love, axe it.  If a category is getting most of the attention, divide it.  Right now the cars forum has 5 topics and 42 posts.  Why not stick those threads under technology

His idea is literally to ban me, polytheist witch and ethang.

That's literally his only idea.

Get the fuck out of here, you have no place in these forums

Last December, I looked at the Leaderboard and found around 140 were active. I use a benchmark of 14 days, in that someone is considered active if they’ve posted within that time frame. Today, the number is about 70, which is half of what it was only 2 months ago.