Wordforge is dying, and you should make peace with that fact

"This place has been dying, is dying, and will continue to die, and a large enough portion of the board are fine with that as long as nothing changes."

So sayeth Ancalagon.

I agree that Wordforge is dying a slow death. Erosion of membership has taken its toll. Anc has failed to stem that tide. Established members who had drifted away prior to his administration have not been convinced to return and consistently participate, and those who left because they didn't like Anc personally have not been swayed by his attempts to reconcile with them. And whatever grand plans Anc may have had in the beginning to build membership have either been abandoned, or they never existed and all that talk was just public relations.

You know, I've been here since the beginning. Wordforge means something to me, as difficult as that may be for some of you to believe. I don't have any great desire to see the place fail. If Ancalagon (or anyone) has any legitimate ideas to get people back, I'm all ears. But I haven't heard any ideas. I haven't heard any strategies.
All I've heard is petty whining about how certain people who Anc doesn't like are polluting the board with "derp" and the elevation of trivial feuds with Garamet & Castle to Shakespearean levels.

So if Ancalagon is right and Wordforge has entered cyber-hospice, are you OK with that?

Somebody should've told me before I registered.

Wait, what? You've increased the membership gene pool by 50%! We need you and a few more to register.

Don't worry.

We've been saying Wordforge is dying for almost ten years now. Yet we are still here.

The reason for Wordforge's decline is that there has been a paradigm shift where the concept of message boards' role is concerned. Where forums are tied to content portals (SpaceBattles) or have a heavily active content-generating community (the Fan Fiction, Fan Productions, and Fan Art sections of TrekBBS), they're humming along just fine.

Wordforge's forums aren't a secondary feature tied to an often-refreshed content portal, nor is content generation as dominant a theme as Cass probably envisioned it would be when she started the board. Instead, the dominant room on Wordforge is the Red Room, which centers on politics, religion, and related topics so universally understood to generate animus that not discussing them over dinner is a sitcom trope.

Wordforge is basically TrekBBS with TNZ as the dominant forum and a lot less Trek to it. That's not what it was supposed to have become, though, if I understand the intention behind the name correctly.

Can it be saved? In a sense. One way to do it would be to de-emphasize the Red Room and re-emphasize the Workshop. I'm sure other posters will have other ideas.

But Ancalagon is right, in a sense. Wordforge, as it exists today, is going to die. That's inevitable. Whether the board undergoes a death-and-rebirth cycle, to a greater or lesser degree, or whether it simply fizzles out never to be seen again is in the hands of the owners and staff.

Wordforge is dead, long live Wordforge!

ftfy

Well, there's tandelou.

I could be wrong, but my recollection is that the wordforge concept was being developed by Cass for writing etc. The TNZ uprising happened and she took the opportunity to combine it as she had everything set up and ready to go. Wordforge as TNZ is what we all hoped for, it may however not have been Cass's original intention.

Thats my memory of it, 11 odd years ago.......

Same. Of course, more of TNZ came through that merger than the original content creation/exhibition idea. IMO, that's a shame, because it turned out that we had more literary talent here than was even apparent going in. There's garamet, Dickynoo, and I was pretty surprised when Storm broke out a novel on us. Jazz has shown off some pretty amazing (and amusing) creations, Paladin's got his artwork, Forbin's got his awesome model building chops on show, and the list goes on. But it all still gets dwarfed by TNZ 2.0.

But isn't that your answer. If you think that that element is important, then that is what you should/WF owners etc should be out promoting and trying to drum up membership for. As far as I'm aware, most of the idea's are centered around drawing a larger crowd to the red room. If you are suddenly saying that the Red Room is not WF's selling point then make your case to the mob and the owners to push the workshop.

There are a few ways to drive traffic in, I mean the board is fairly wide in interests.

I know the board has a Twitter account, why not roll that into it more? Tweet something, which forms the basis of a new kind of thread (little bird icon) where Twatters can respond on twitter and would appear in-thread, with WF member responses being tweeted as responses containing the member name (NOT their Twitter handle, there should be no linking between individual WF accounts and Twitter accounts) and a link to the post on the thread.

Or better still, have multiple Twitter accounts - one for the RR, one for MC, one for TF and one for the Workshop. That you way can drive traffic to specific parts of the board without necessarily putting folk off by having their first taste being the RR.

You could prolly do similar with other feeds too.

Third paragraph sounds like a really good idea.

@WF_WS for the Workshop, for example, or @WF_RR for the Red Room.

I'm down for this. I don't know about getting tweets into a thread, but if @John can mangle the RSS feeds a little for me, getting new threads automatically to Twitter isn't a problem.

Getting the tweets in shouldn't be *too* problematic, just depends on what happens with them. Whenever I've needed to roll tweets in to something, it's always been a case of having a cron job/service running in the back and harvesting the latest bunch every few minutes and dumping them in a database. In this case it's be dumped into whatever table stores the threads, albeit with an ID for a special user representing twitter.

You could just fold them in via client side, but that'd probably require chucking a threads contents into a viewmodel and merging them before binding to the HTML with something like knockout or angular, plus you can hit the maximum number of queries Twitter allows you that way pretty quickly!

I signed up for a dying forum? Nobody sent me the memo.

I know, right? What a letdown.

Flashlight, you and Ancalagon are taking this waaaaaaay too seriously, and overlooking something in the process. Wordforge has been around for 11 years and we were all together in TNZ years before that. This board is our medium, but the bond is more then the place. It's a watering hole where longtime friends meet to talk, gossip, bicker, and act like an ass in total comfort. Some members have fallen by the wayside only to return, and we have had some folks pass, never to return.

Ancalagon and the other 'owners' are not owners at all, they are stewards of our meeting place. Somebody else will pick up the raines when they tire of it.

Personally, if there was an annual membership fee that covered the cost of running the joint, I'd be ok with that. Every two-three years we could all vote on picking three members who make all decisions on running the board, such as paying the domain and license fees, planning the software upgrades, and appointing the staff for the day to day operations.

Yeah, but you're a Zombie now.....

I'm pretty sure I remember reading it in fine print on page 2 of the TOS back in 2006. Of course, you could only get to page 2 by correctly executing the Konami Code while whistling into the microphone of your webcam.

You both sound like fun. Why not start an introduction thread over in the welcome forum and make up some fascinating facts about yourselves, or, if it's more fun, each other?

The last time I took advice from someone who had the Tree of Life as their avatar, I woke up 3 weeks later in Bolivia.

Or did that happen to John McAfee? I get us mixed up sometimes.

Well, take my advice, and you might wake up in Fernando Poo.

It seems John Castle is becoming Ancalagon's Baba.

So...who's duals are they??


Someone had to ask.

I thought garamet was Anc's Baba?

I think it depends on what side of the bed he get out of on a particular morning.

Garamet can be Anc's Baba.

John Castle can be Anc's Tasvir.

Wordforge is just fine the way it is.

Now all you hippies get off my lawn.

But I need both hands to... um...