To make this forum popular, I predict two most important things:
- Make this environment comfortable and welcoming. Brad has done a lot toward this end and so far this is looking amazing. I'm sure we can improve things, like improving the readability/accessibility of the forum within the Joomla frame, but these adjustments will develop with time.
- Take the initiative to commit to actually using this forum. I think we have a large enough group this time that we can all agree to jump on here and start using it. It really is hard to start off, 'cause you feel a bit like you're talking to yourself, but if other people don't see activity then they won't join in. So this means that we'll have to start subjects on things, ie. stuff in the news, fun things found on the Internet, and TEAM CHEESUS stuff of course.
Given the nature of our community, we do have an intriguing opportunity to craft a theme or a sense of character into this website and the server that most gaming communities don't typically enjoy. I think this will have a massive "first impression" effect.
In order to benefit from random encounters properly, we need to very clearly tie the website to the game server and vice-versa.
We can also think about how to maximize the benefit of visitors from search engines such as Google. For example, it's a good idea to learn about how "Google bombing" works and why, in turn, it's a good idea to put two links to the site, one with the site's title and the second with a description of what we are, into your forum signature on all the other forums you use.
Keeping the meta tags up to date for the web crawler to read is also a good idea, and Joomla already makes that easy to do in the Admin options.
By the way, I enabled as default some user-customizable options that I think help to optimize the interface for comfort. The "quick reply" box is one such example, as well as the rich text editor for posts (called 'WYSIWYG' usually). Sadly, the WYSIWYG editor doesn't seem to interpret line spaces properly. Maybe I can find a fix for that, as I do think rich text editing is better and preferred over dropping shorthand forum tags all over the place.
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