Hiya! Pkero here; game designer and Menewshan since '07. I remember back when this place was live as all hell thanks to a posting on Tektek.org back in Gaia Online's glory days - Menewsha was flush with new blood. While it certainly never hit the snowball that Gaia did, it also never sold out to MTV and became a money-grubbing dump.

That aside, the site has become much smaller, and I think there are some low-cost solutions to the problem of inactivity - this will not only make the site feel livelier for those of us that are here, but also lower the barrier of entry to new posters.

Proposal A: Consolidation
From my background in game development, I've spoken with many a community manager. Their research in maintaining active communities shows that a forum is best when it has around ~100 people, 30 of whom are active posters, and that general discussion forums are always a bad idea.

Now, GD in Menewsha is still one of the more active on the site, and when Menewsha was livelier, it was heavily moderated to control the content and prevent it from degrading into something more akin to Gaia's own GD; a place for nudes and shitposting, none of which fit very well with Menewsha's culture.

I see it working something like this:
City Hall: Leave it alone. Good breakdown, and these boards aren't meant to really be super active. Consider moving the welcome lounge here, or even making it a thread in hangouts since a lot of new posters seem to go straight to GD, which brings me to...

Community Center:
Consolidate GD and Hangouts; keep more threads active in one forum. Make ED its own forum so it's not buried. I might go so far as to say all subforums should be eliminated - the fewer clicks it takes to get to posting, the more likely people are to post.

Avatar chat seems to be the next most popular, and should probably remain where it is. Quests can probably go to exchange.

Roleplay:
Four forums:
Lobby - remains as is.
RP - General roleplay forum.
Private - 1on1 roleplays.
OOC - All threads that need an OOC just make it here.

I understand a lot of people enjoy roleplaying - while it's not really my thing, it's also something that doesn't need as much segmenting. Most of these additional forums are pretty dead.

Entertainment Theater:
Honestly, I think this could all be consolidated into one 'Media' forum up in the Community Center, and would serve as a more topic-centric version of hangouts. I could go farther and suggest that these all just be threads in Hangouts, but I think after getting the GD/Hangouts forums combined then we get to the point where that forum gets a bit too noisy.

Commercial District:
Leave it alone, mostly. Contests/charities could potentially be combined.

Creativity Plaza:
Throw it all into separate threads in the media forum. This place is a deadzone. If anything, sticky a thread for our users who make items. The fact that we have user-created content that is not only high-quality but actively incorporated into the site is one of the coolest things here.

Aaand obviously, the history archives stay put.

BEFORE I CONTINUE, this is not a perfect plan. You may love it, you may hate it. let's talk about it. I think trimming the fat off the forums is a great idea, but this may not be a perfect solution.

Proposal B: Incentives
This one is a bit tricky, as screwing with the Menewshan economy is something that could upset long-time Menewshans. Obviously at this stage, user retention is a pretty high priority.

What is it that keeps people coming back to massively multiplayer games if not the community? That's right, dailies.

Gaia experimented with this before spiraling out of control - your first post gives you extra gold. Making a couple extra posts gives you additional gold, maybe. If you make posts in multiple forums, you'll get additional gold, or maybe even an item.

This does create an incentive for users to post more often, but can of course create an incentive to just make bad posts, but:
A) Menewsha's gold system already rewards longer posts up to a point, and the community is small enough that this is virtually never abused and
B) This place needs active users to grow. Causing the mods to post a few more infractions is a small price to pay for the occasional lazy post.

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I'd really like to start a dialog on these suggestions - Menewsha is a great place that I keep coming back to, and I'd like to see it improve. These implementations should have reasonably low overhead, and any shuttered forums could be moved to archives so as to not break any old links - the worst part about it would be moving any old threads, but limiting it to threads active in the last ~3 months or so shouldn't ruffle too many feathers.

Please post comments and suggestions, and I'd really love to hear what the admins think about these problems; I know the site's activity is a topic of perilous discussion from time to time.

I like to see a separate site created that was like the old site Mobamingle that was owned by Dena Inc .The Japanese owned company had a good thing going on for awhile .Menewsha is a cool site .Maybe seperate sites to get more members would be cool to .

---------- Post added 03-20-2016 at 01:10 AM ----------

I like your ideas .I want to see more people join .Sister sites would be cool to that are different for people who are use to the older sites that are gone .

I'm glad you're opening this discussion, Pkero.

City Hall
I agree with what you said about City Hall.

Community Center
I disagree that General Discussion and Hangouts should be combined. From what I see, both of these subforums are already separately active in their own ways, i.e. General Discussion threads are more focused in topic, while Hangouts threads are for random chatter.

I do think The Meneverse and Avatar Chat could be combined. You even notice overlap in their current forum descriptions:

Originally Posted by The Meneverse

Discussion for all things about the site and the world of Menewsha

Originally Posted by Avatar Chat

Discuss Menewsha's avatars and items

Roleplay Hall
I agree that the Roleplay Hall subforums could be consolidated. The roleplaying subcommunity here is (at least currently) not large enough to warrant categorizing roleplays by genre.

Having participated in various roleplays over the years here, I've noticed that most roleplays (both 1x1 and group) start off in the Roleplay Lobby in OOC or Roleplay Requests. So, I agree with keeping the Roleplay Lobby as is, while consolidating everything else into General or Private roleplays.

OOC is currently a subforum in the Roleplay Lobby, but we can also make it a separate forum that includes Character Journals as a subforum.

Entertainment Theater
I agree with consolidation and moving of these subforums higher up, in the Community Center. A new Media subforum would cover most of the current Entertainment Theater subforums, i.e. Comics, Manga, and Anime, Films and Television, Books, and Computers & Gaming. However, I am not sure where Sports and Fitness would fit into the current idea.

Yeah, I can see keeping GD and Hangouts separate; they both have new posts daily more often than not. I'd imagine sports and fitness could just be a thread in Hangouts assuming someone wants to make a thread; seems a good topic for one.

Meneverse/Avatar Chat is a good one; I don't spend as much time in those forums but you're right; seems they could be made into some broader forum. Meneverse discussion could also take the form of a stickied thread somewhere. Or maybe combine it with the welcome lounge so that new users can get an idea of who the admins are and what the events in Mene are like?

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks a bit of cleanup would do some good. Anything that gets more people talking to each other is a good way to keep building the community.

I also think it's great to see people invested in finding and discussing ways to build the community :)

That sounds good to me, having Sports and Fitness be a stickied thread.

Commercial District
Right now, the Charity subforum requires permission from a staff member to create a thread, while Contests and Giveaways does not. That is my only hesitation about combining the two subforums. It makes sense to combine them, but we would have to rethink the criteria, if any, for starting threads.

Creativity Plaza
It is sadly true that Creativity Plaza is sort of a "deadzone" as you call it. I do have a thread in Art Post where I keep my art collection, and I created a thread recently in the Round Robins/Drabbles sub-subforum in Writer's Conference, but there is almost no activity overall.

History Archives
I agree with keeping History Archives as is.

Incentives
I like the idea of having a daily incentive. We already sort of do have a daily incentive, i.e. the 50 gold you can get daily from "liking" threads with your Facebook account. I don't think most people remember to do it, although it is there. But I assume from your proposal that you would want to incorporate a daily incentive into actually posting in the forums, to ensure a daily boost of activity. I'm all for that idea, assuming they can and are willing to write and add in that bit of code.

I would definitely agree with the original post except for one thing. The GD is typically the first place newer users go and it is very important in giving them a simple place to start out. Keeping that and hangouts separate is ideal. Hangouts are typically far more active and would end up burying the GD topics.

I would definitely agree though that making menewsha seem faster and having less forums makes it simpler would give us a less complicated site for new users.

As for the gold incentive, that would take coding which Menewsha can't really afford at the moment.

I'm all for the GD and Hangouts remaining separate; points made by you and salvete make a strong case for that.

I am curious as to how much backend is actually required to add a simple popup in Javascript to occasionally give out gold or something. I don't know about Menewsha's codebase, but I do know that that's reasonably simple on a blank page. Who even are Mene's code monkeys, if anyone at this point?

I forget who is responsible for the backend. I wouldn't mind looking through the code with you if they'd let us.

I mean, just looking at the page source, I don't even see any PHP here. Just some JavaScript functions to get the posts from a database and write them out on the page. I'd think the biggest concern would be making sure page formatting doesn't get broken by adding any new elements, plus putting in whatever necessary checks to make sure whatever pop-up can't be abused to make additional gold.

Might not need to be a pop-up either, that was just the first thing that sprung to mind. I'm sure us industrious Menewshans can think of a relatively low-risk solution that would get people posting more.

Mene's coders are Yanyan and Inso I think, but Yanyan has a life and so does Inso. Both barely have time to add new things.

I'm sure if Mene's old event code for getting EI currency would work well for it but it would put the site at risk for bots unless they spawned in random areas to be clicked on, and that sounds like it would take a lot of coding to do.

Maybe we can add a "Daily Gold" tab, then do a little copy pasting and editing of the code for the daily 50 gold we get from liking two threads. Depending what the code looks like.

A no-code solution would be someone hosting a thread where people post daily. And then that someone using the already-existent donation system to donate gold to each person who posts. But that would be a lot of work on someone's part to do it, so ideally it would be automated.

Pkero, thanks for all the feedback. I was heavily involved in the forum reorganization last year, so I'm definitely interested to hear what people think of it, regarding what works and what doesn't. I think you raised a lot of good suggestions here. We let of of quite a few unused forums last year (pretty much all the IRL subforms) and we could probably stand to consolidate further.

Regarding the Meneverse forum: the intention for that forum is to house all of the site lore (plot lines, NPC profiles, etc) and provide a dedicated place for members to discuss that stuff. We've also informally come to use it as the place to post event signups and contest results. The current description of the forum doesn't really fit that though, does it? (lol) Meanwhile, I see Avatar Chat as being specifically for things related to our avatars, which are a huge part of the site after all, and worthy of their own discussion area. Still, this is giving me some food for thought.

Anyway, I'd love to hear more thoughts on this.

I had noticed the name of the Meneverse seemed rather odd to me. Every time I see it I'm a bit puzzled what it's supposed to mean.

Good to know that the name Meneverse isn't obviously clear. I think it's mainly a contraction of "Menewsha Universe." Kinda like the way characters talk about "the 'verse" in the show Firefly. It also reminds me of verses of music or epic poetry, but that's more obscure.

That is true, but we are but a small island. Seems too... "big" I suppose.

Chexala, would it make sense to consolidate Contests and Giveaways with the Meneverse? The contests forum is waaay down at the bottom of the page and doesn't see much traffic, and they do serve essentially the same purpose.

Bearzy, that's an interesting idea. I can see it having good and bad points.

Definitely has some good and bad points, but especially because of the clutter of after event posts that might confuse users, but if you made a subforum specifically for contest results, it would help reduce the clutter of posts not really important for chatting.

I also recently made a contest for movie suggestions that has nothing to do with Menewsha specifically. So I feel like we need a separate contest subforum not restricted to Meneverse-related things

Oh yeah, that's a point Sal. Where did you put that, movies or contests?

Originally Posted by Chexala

Pkero, thanks for all the feedback. I was heavily involved in the forum reorganization last year, so I'm definitely interested to hear what people think of it, regarding what works and what doesn't. I think you raised a lot of good suggestions here. We let of of quite a few unused forums last year (pretty much all the IRL subforms) and we could probably stand to consolidate further.

Regarding the Meneverse forum: the intention for that forum is to house all of the site lore (plot lines, NPC profiles, etc) and provide a dedicated place for members to discuss that stuff. We've also informally come to use it as the place to post event signups and contest results. The current description of the forum doesn't really fit that though, does it? (lol) Meanwhile, I see Avatar Chat as being specifically for things related to our avatars, which are a huge part of the site after all, and worthy of their own discussion area. Still, this is giving me some food for thought.

Anyway, I'd love to hear more thoughts on this.

Oop; haven't checked the thread in awhile, but I'm glad the feedback was helpful.

It makes sense in terms of overall structure; my underlying motive was just to crunch the forums down to as few as possible to increase user interaction. Maybe events could just take place in the Meneverse forum, with that getting bumped up to the top of the main page during events? That way traffic to it is increased, and maybe the underlying world of Menewsha gets more exposure overall?

Just throwing ideas out; all-in-all my interest is in seeing the site generally become more active.

Since they like to archive events afterwards, I think keeping them their own forum is still ideal. That and meneverse does have activity of it's own that would get wiped out after every event.

Has anyone ever given thought to the profiles here on Menewsha?

A user is quite limited as to what can be done to their own profiles. You can post only one profile photo and only one. Why not six? Colors can be played, but few here ever do that.

The blogs here are virtually invisible. On Mobion and Mobamingle, blogs were the life of the party. There was a blog feed in which all in the community could view posted blogs. And this feature brought attention to one's profile which in turn caused a profile owner to improve his or her profile.

Unfortunately, the taboo subject of blogs and making blogs more prevalent only invites derision here.

Pkero, I like your ideas for consolidating forums here on the site, but I doubt they will ever be implemented. The reason for this being that human nature fears change and that once change has come things can never revert back to the way things were prior to change. To be frank, I believe the powers that be here have become complacent and will merely equate your ideas to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I believe that items are what drives this site and indeed other avatar sites like it. But, over the past few months it seems that interest from Menewsha brass in giving users what THEY want has gradually decreased. I and others have voiced our discontent and are now waiting for things to improve.

It heartens me that you have stopped in and have made the suggestions that you did. It shows that you care and I like that. I like it a lot. And I like that salvete has made the suggestions that augment your own ideas. I hope that you will frequent Menewsha more often.

Are you a game programmer?

Actually Mr.Wrong, we recently did consolidate many of our forums. There was a whole lifestyles section that has since been consolidated into other forums. There are many things that go into big changes however, just because something looks good on paper doesn't always mean it will be well when implemented. We have to discuss the various angles on how things could work and would work before actually jumping in head first. Especially because to do changes requires that we barter for the use of our one Dev. who also Dev's for another of the sites that the owner owns. Change takes money and resources, things we have little to none of. That being said, there are some good suggestions up there and we have brought that to light among staff.

Originally Posted by Cora

Actually Mr.Wrong, we recently did consolidate many of our forums. There was a whole lifestyles section that has since been consolidated into other forums. There are many things that go into big changes however, just because something looks good on paper doesn't always mean it will be well when implemented. We have to discuss the various angles on how things could work and would work before actually jumping in head first. Especially because to do changes requires that we barter for the use of our one Dev. who also Dev's for another of the sites that the owner owns. Change takes money and resources, things we have little to none of. That being said, there are some good suggestions up there and we have brought that to light among staff.

I'm fine with the overall format and locations of the forums. My issue is with the blogs. It's like they've been handcuffed to an old radiator in an abandoned building on Staten Island.

I know. I know. Money and resources. I get it.

But thank you for showing up here and commenting. It does show that you care.