From my experience website visitation is as important as joining. That is controlled by 3 major factors. 1. changes. Most social gadflies who could become members monitor for site changes, new features, back end design etc. This is the site owners/designers job. It has to change at least every 2 weeks and requires some dedicated people to continually work on it under supervision of the aforementioned. 2. Meaningful content. Content has to available, interesting, purposeful. 3. Activities. Contests, forums, chat rooms, quizzes, puzzles etc. All these need to be site oriented and of different degrees of difficulty. There should be open activities and member exclusives. I can't speak to reads only but as a writer I can tell you writers crave attention and feed back. I would work to encourage better comments which include some aspect of technique as well as content. Writers need to become thicker skinned and readers need to become more willing to critique. overall we do very well here but tolerance is golden especially among writers and readers. We also somehow flood readers with too many stories. It might help to separate the book serials from the individual stories. Just a thought. A site redesign would need to be done for this. A navigation change to offer a choice of the different categories boiled down would be the first page and then branch from there. These are just suggestions. I really like the site as it is It has encouraged me greatly to take up writing again and also provided validation from people who are not just your personal friends. I would hate to see the site die off, or become a numbers game just to brag on. Quality is more important to me.
May your parchment be smooth, your ink never blot, and your writing never block.
Kind of annoyed right now. Today I came across a ranting system that rated how good Ss is. It compared safety of the site, how frequent traffic is on here, the number of stories published in a week. Etc. Well anyways, the ranting is at 57.1. Can you believe that?! And since the beginning of January the use of this site went down 3%. It sucks you know, being here for three years and to see this site slowly dying isn't fun. I really wish we could increase the membership but it would take a lot of work and time from people.
In all reality, it is the members that needs to make this more fun and desirables to be on here. Same with mods pushing us to do the same.
I'm not one to talk. Personally, I have been either too busy or I find that I don't want to log on and interact on here as much. Everyone is so focused on gaining members and promoting the site. How about retaining members? We always had some small competition on here to keep interest, meet people and interact outside of the forums. Maybe it the focus was more on the internal structure of the website, the promoting will be natural and genuine excitement to have others join. I used to be excited about this site. Log on every day, play all of the forum games just because I could and had general happiness about being an active member. Then times change, people change, and suddenly something I once looked forward to every day, I don't even think about it weekly. And this has been such an issue for years, but no one has really done anything about it. A few have tried but overall, we haven't.
I know it must be hard work being a moderator and a site official, they must have a lot on their plate, but is anyone paying attention to this thread? Are notes being made from what has been suggested before? A few people mentioned before that this site hasn't changed in years and that nothing is being actively done to change or improve the website. It's a shame that SS is losing members. I like being here, I like publishing stories and poems and giving my silly personal opinions in the forums, but with views continuing to decrease on stories that are published, I feel as if there is no incentive for me to want to stay here.
I've said it before and I will say it again; competitions. Advertise on the 'other side' about competitions and see if that provokes interest and few new members. New story categories? New ways to earn badges? Perhaps bring back the chat room feature? It is listed when one signs up, so why not reinstate that?
Makes this a politics free site!!!!
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