Forum proposal

I am sure some of you are well aware of the low forum activity by none-senior members.
This is not a good thing for an alliance and we should work to resolve this problem.
Apart from the reason related to the people themselves i think there are a couple of other reasons that caused this situation:

This forum has too many rooms.. There are a lot of them, most unused anymore, this creates a perception of an information overflow and reluctance to go through it all for some people, leading to a very superficial interest in the forum.

The bigger problem is us - the Seniors. As the main active people of the forum were the Seniors we felt comfortable posting in the Senior room leaving the rest of the form for the less important/interesting messages leading members to determine that the forum contains little useful information and thus again - the reluctance to invest time in participation or follow up of the forum.

What i can suggest to fix this:
First of all due to the nature of the alliance i think we should be more open and share information with all members. Only the real high end issues which require discreet handling or final votes which only the Seniors participate in should be left for the senior only room... The rest should be posted here.

Rooms that duplicate the purpose of another room should be removed.

coucil forum will be used mainly for the purpose of council votes, the pre-voting discussion should be public.

Rooms build suggest to leave is
Public (all members)
1. Announcements Forum - Would be as it sounds.. A forum containing info for the members where new posts are rare and is used for referense.
2. Guides forum - possibly can be combined with the Announcements forum, but can stay on it's own as there also new posts are rare and contain just informative information for new players.
3. General Chat - the main alliance forum, can be renamed to that as well.
4. Trade forum - This will replace ALL the separate sector rooms, they all together are less active than General chat is at this moment. The main guidelines regarding sectors can be left as pinned posts.
5. Diplomacy - This will contain the NAPs and foe lists of the alliance.. A pinned post will contain the list off all the friends foes and treaties of the OPC and the other posts will detail the treaty contents and other related posts.
Restricted
Fighters Wing - this forum will remain, it is accessible only for members of the talon and council and it's purpose is the planned Talon OPs and assignments that need to be planned in a closed envirement.
Council room - Forum for council votes and descrete discussions.

Good idea? bad idea? any grey area thoughts?

I think this is a great idea. though i have never had the problem of not reading the new items...
Did the sectors have a separate area... if not there should be one probably naming it "sectors" or something hehe

*** check that i saw the trade thread

Right now every sector has a room of it's own.
I suggest leaving only one room: Trade chat, which will contain the discussion regarding all sectors.
the main guidelines for each sector will be posted in an announcement.

Agreed that we need to do something to increase activity on here,

However I do not think it is all to do with the overload of information. Rather I think it is partly to do with people not being bothered to check the forums and happy to just fly around in pardus with the protection of our allaince and contribute anything to it.

What we need is a way to make more people actually care about our alliance and help it to prosper.


As an example of the people who don't care about our alliance we have 70 registered users out of a total of 73 members in our allaince.

Yet out of thease 70 members we have 21 that have never posted, 8 that have posted once. and 13 that have posted less than 10 times, which means 43 members have posted less than 10 times. It is these members that we need to attract to post more.

just because we are not posting doesnt mean we are not looking, its just that I only post when I feel the need to. I read everything, and any info I could use, I use, info that turns out not to me for me, I just ignore until it does apply to me. Other then that, I dont post often because I dont need to, if I feel I have a valid opinion(like right now), then Ill post, but I dont do it just for kicks. so just because some of us dont post often does necicaraly mean we dont care. hell, I have spent most of my time in the game maping out sectors and doing what other people need done. I dont own a single building that I placed for myself, every building I have was desperately needed when I built it, and the only one that isn't as useful now is my brewery. LOL. people stoped drinking as often.


Orak, you should consider a retiered post section. anything that people stoped commenting on could be moved here, if its not a sticky, and can be read but no longer posted in. that way, new members can still see what all people here were interested in, and they could still get useful info from them. Just a thought.

I did not mean to suggest that people don't post in the forums Dumbman its just that with the people that do not post or contribute to the alliance in other ways how are we to know that they are actually interested in helping the alliance grow and not just using us for protection?