Why is the forum so quiet?

[besters]

Blood Bowl Reddit already has 54 comments from the news release yesterday. My theory, and it seems supported by Lyracian's NAF tourney anecdote, I don't believe the remaining forum users here have any interest in Blood Bowl if it isn't CRP or LRB.

Not sure that is true. I think tabletop tournaments generate most comments here and they have moved to the new version.

[EastCoast]

There's really not that much traffic there either.

[Mystic Force]

I am getting a little worried that soon I will be the last poster on every forum thread here, but anyway I will plow on. I think the basic problem is that the diversity of places that one can interact with BB content online has diluted the value of a place like this, which at one point was one of the main places to go. I bet there is a large number of newer coaches who don't even know this place exists and the one that stumble across it do not find a vibrant engaging place as the amount of posting has gone way down in just the last two years. There are people I know who are active in BB who have accounts on here that engage on other platforms instead of coming here. There is clearly a network effect in play here, but what I am wondering is why people are not having the same discussions here as in other places even if there are fewer people involved.

Maybe forums are just old hat, maybe the site name is an issue (and I know there is not much that can be done to rectify this one) in attracting users. Maybe we need some good old fashioned PR on those other platforms to bring people here.

[Lyracian]

I am getting a little worried that soon I will be the last poster on every forum thread here, but anyway I will plow on.

I can work on fixing that one.

Maybe forums are just old hat, maybe the site name is an issue (and I know there is not much that can be done to rectify this one) in attracting users. Maybe we need some good old fashioned PR on those other platforms to bring people here.

I am not sure how you raise engagement or get everyone on one platform. Our league has Facebook, Forum and Discord. Tourplay as well since that hosts the league data. Not everyone is engaged on the different platforms.

I think it is great you keep posting all the news posts here. It certainly saves me having to try and find stuff when there are snippets turning up on Discord. If you can keep it up this may draw other users back but I am not sure how long you can keep going before your enthusiasm dwindles.

[nazgob]

All the cool kids use discord...

https://discord.gg/XcZGV8ve

[lunchmoney]

Discord = jarring cacophony. Where a message is posted and disappears moments later in the flood of replies. Making it really hard to post news and announcements etc.

[spubbbba]

Blood Bowl Reddit already has 54 comments from the news release yesterday. My theory, and it seems supported by Lyracian's NAF tourney anecdote, I don't believe the remaining forum users here have any interest in Blood Bowl if it isn't CRP or LRB.

Even Fumbbl has had more discussion about the Khorne team and the new Bloodbeast than here.

Tournament discussion has long dominated this forum. I don't think that's a bad thing as it is good to have it all in one place. If you have no interest in tournament then I can see why reddit is a better option.

It also probably doesn't help that the name of the forum had to be changed. I can see that limiting the number of newbies who find the site. Then on top of that the lack of activity and lack of interest in the new rules/models will not retain them either.

[Steam Ball]

The domain does not say BB, header and context should be good for search engines. I doubt domain matters much nowadays as URLs have been changed mostly into random noise by webdevs, so general populance have been mis-trained (we can talk about the effects on phising, lock in and other things in private).

Small note: most new posts appear in the same place, so the proper subsections look dead. It is ironic: complains about organization then everything dumped into General. New and relaunched models fit better in Products, BB3 threads in Digital, podcasts in Digital>Podcasts, what skills to add to a certain positional in Tactics & Team Development, and so on.

Also ISTR in the past there was an issue with HTTPS, so probably lost some relevance in search results, or even appeared as dead/"scary" when visited.

[Mystic Force]

Also ISTR in the past there was an issue with HTTPS, so probably lost some relevance in search results, or even appeared as dead/"scary" when visited.

last night trying to log in to post a reply my router blocked me because it said it was unsecure. I imagine that might be a significant turn off to anyone new!

[lunchmoney]

The lack of HTTPS is another thing I could fix. If the owner replied to me and let me do things

[Steam Ball]

last night trying to log in to post a reply my router blocked me because it said it was unsecure. I imagine that might be a significant turn off to anyone new!

Site currently works via Let's Encrypt certs. Maybe your router got hit by the change in the certificates chain (it was in the news recently, one up the chain expired and not all devices got a new valid chain, some devices will be hard or impossible to update).

The lack of HTTPS is another thing I could fix. If the owner replied to me and let me do things

HTTPS works but no idea since when, because I am not checking it periodically, I just checked again after being inspired by this thread. Current cert is valid since 2021-09-11, so at least some weeks.