tl;dr:
A. We are sinking. Something has to change.
B. I have a solid plan to save the game side. Give me one more month to give you a strong working demo of the future our game technology. Keep hope alive until April 1, but if I fail to deliver by fools day then I wouldn't blame you if your hope dies.
C. I do not have a good plan for the forum/community side. What should we do?
Long version.
RU is in sick. Traffic is the worst ever, by far. Games work only on Windows, which is also losing market share. Only works in old FF and old IE. Without a massive update the site will soon be obsolete. The forum software is super old and is probably about to become a security risk, just because that is what old popular software normally does. Spam is already growing because vbulletin is dusty. Mobile is taking over the internet and we barely work on a phone.
RU has 3 functions.
1. Make finding, playing and learning about retro games easy and fun.
2. Track scores.
3. Forums - community.
I have a plan to fix 1&2. I have said this for so long and without any evidence that I have lost all credibility. Give me one more month to convince you I'm telling the truth. If I don't deliver a strong beta by April 1 then I will lose faith myself. If you have no evidence to the contrary by fools day then you can assume the future of RU is bleak. I am optimistic and want you to be too but be realistic, it is do or die time.
@ #3. The forum/community only - not the games or scores.
RU/EVG/Facebook are the only community based websites I have ever used. I am not the target user and I am not the best person to design the solution. I do not know what the solution is.
First problem, our forum software is 10 years old. This is an easy fix. Upgrade to https://vanillaforums.org/.
Examples
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/
https://www.kixeye.com/forum
https://vanillaforums.org/discussions
But is that enough?
The second problem, the problem I don't understand, our forum concept is also outdated. The internet has changed and we are not keeping up.
So input please.
Should we continue to have a forum at all? Maybe we should start a reddit or twitch or steam or facebook or other group? Maybe we should do like YouTube and have comments on each game but not a forum, or in addition to forum. Brainstorm, get creative. What are the alternatives? What is working elsewhere? What do you want?
Without input I will just upgrade to vanilla, do nothing else and call it done. Not because I think it is a great solution but because it is the only idea have. If you do not like this option then comment.
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