Mostly I’m the only user that creates content on this forum. And as an admin I can see the analytic data (of which I’m excluded, so I’m not reading my own activities). I see around 10-15 daily unique visitors (not logged in) and about 3-5 logged in users, with many page views. And each month about 15 new users sign up. And then some people also interact with the automatic cross posting on social-media.
However, new content creators, or people that interact with the content are lacking. It seems like people treat the forum more as a news site rather than a community platform to interact and buildup the movement. This is of course one way to keep the forum relevant, but for that a forum would be overkill. A Grav blog would do the trick as well in that case, which could run on a Raspberry Pi Or I could simply use the blog I already have.
So I wonder what’s stopping people to engage. Create posts, leave comments, liking and sharing topics and such. If there are ways to improve this, then I would like to know!
First, there are no engaging content,
silly content is not allowed; which could draw people in to discuss things.
Also, almost everything is considered offtopic in this forum.
Result: you are living in an information island that can’t link to other less sophisticated things,
on which majority of people could grow.
Second
I think it’s the user interface of the Discourse.
It takes too much effort, not that user friendly as one would think.
For me, it’s good enough now, that I’m familiar with it more.
But I can remember things being annoying in the UI design from the start.
I still think that older forums were more intuitive than the modern ones that
always feel lacking something and hard to navigate or do things.
Thanks for the feedback! It’s always welcome! But some more details would be helpful. Can you give examples of engaging topics you would like to see posted more? I think the TZM train of thought is very broad (science, technology, society, nature, sustainability, economy). Do you also examples of what is off topic and you would want to post? We do have Uncategorized.
The UI is something to get used to indeed. But it works for many (large) communities and is like Reddit and other platforms. So after adjusting to it shouldn’t be a problem. People can customize their Discourse experience as well with different topic views, filters and custom notifications. Not saying it cannot be an issue, but I do think there are solutions.
Or I could simply use the blog I already have.
