The future of this site...

The future of this site...

People on here have probably noticed recently that this whole site is turning into a virtual ghost town.

This site has always lost members, people move on from going out and music and stop coming on here. They develop real lives

Luckily new people usually take an interest, sign up, post, and as a result there's always a steady stream of faces and banter on here, until now.

There's no getting away from the fact that facebook has had a massive impact on this site and others like it. It's easier to use to keep in touch with mates, easier to share stuff, and easier to organise events. I can see it on my news feed - people who used to regularly contribute on here now just post on facebook between themselves. I don't blame people for doing so - I do it as well.

We've done things to try and change this - there's the podcast, all the upgrades and changes MoS and I made to the site when we first started running it, and all the upgrades since (like the facebook integration, and the media addons). It still doesn't seem to be enough. We've gone from a site that used to attract hundreds of posts a day to a handful. If it continues further I can see this board becoming a nostalgia site with no users.

So I'm opening up the future of this site to all of you who use it, new members or old. I'd like to hear your ideas as to what you want to see from this site in future. If you have an idea or an improvement you'd like us to make, please feel free to post it. I'd also like your thoughts on what you don't like about the site at the moment and what would you would change if you were in charge.

Be honest. If you have something you'd like to say, no matter how small, fire away

The problem is that facebook's privacy options for applications are far too complicated as well, and I don't want to have to choose for people whether they want all the options turned on or none of them.

Last thing I want to do is piss people off with loads of fb notifications all over their walls whenever someone replies to one of their threads. Having two sets of controls (one on here and one on facebook) doesn't help when it's meant to make things easier to get involved on here

If people want, I can turn certain things on by default, and then you don't have to go sifting through all the options to make it work properly.

Fair point with the advertising - I've got a fair bit of money to throw round at the moment, so I'd be willing to contribute towards someone's flyer costs if they're willing to have our website on their flyers. Failing that I'd be happy to get our own done that publicise this place and the podcast.

The rinsing that takes place on here is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. You should have seen it when I first joined

True, but I'm never a believer in giving up. This site will be nine years old in September, not bad for a site originally set up as a forum to talk about Promise

I don't want to be the person that brings it all to a close by not trying to keep it going

Moving the forums round is a good idea - maybe music should feature higher up?

Which brings me onto another point I've been pondering - what do people want done about the various spammers we have, who don't contribute anything other than publicising their own events?

All the local peeps and promoters tend to post on here as well as going on about their events, but we have a lot of users old and new who simply use this place to spam their own events and releases. Examples being KrisA, KristofferL, mindmatter, CC001, cushdj, djx2, and niceguydanny among others. I can only find a few examples where any one of them have replied to a post, and to be honest they clutter everything up. If you look the music forum now, pretty much every post on the first page belongs to one of them.

Do people want them moved into a "national promotions" forum we can ignore, or banning, or simply leaving alone?

to be fair, we need a moderator who is a complete cunt to stir things up, I was thinking of either hummel or pike

cheers for that hummel