Afternoon everyone,
     For those of you who may not know me, my name is cooler and I have worked with John (dystopia) on and off for the last decade or so starting on MSN Groups. I have always been passionate about message board role playing and lately I've had an urge to do ever I can to help bring it back. I'm my opinion, two things heavily contributed to the downfall of message board role playing.
     The first was definitely the downfall of MSN Groups. However, what brought down groups? It was a combination of factors that caused activity to drop. One was that there was not enough new members joining MSN Groups anymore. This added with the current population ageing had a large impact on activity falling. People started getting older and busier and moved on. This created a huge drop in activity as far too many people were leaving a opposed to joining. Eventually, Microsoft made the decision to close groups down and move in a different direction.
     Second, online video games. During the Golden Age of groups a lot of people were still on a dial up connection and video games were not nearly as popular let online games. However, as we all know, internet became faster and video games became more popular and even more socially acceptable. World of WarCraft was released and many people preferred playing with others this way as opposed to message boards. Slowly, the amount of people role playing declined and those who stayed became less active.
     So, what can we do to combat this and bring in more activity? The first step obviously is to have active leadership here, something that John and I have talked about and will do what we can to become active. Then, we need places to for players to role play. However, we are few in number and although we have several good RPGs that we could open and run, doing so would result in failure as we could not manage them all. To remedy this, we have adopted a simple motto, simplicity and automation. Make the groups more simple and automate ad much as we can, which would allow a small amount of people to run multiple groups. If we can launch multiple groups simultaneously, we then give players more choices and places to be active and hopefully give a reason for people to come here and join or make their own groups.
     Finally, for those of you that are here, your help is needed if you believe in our goal. The best thing we can all do, is become as active as we can and engage in conversations here on the boards or create your own groups or volunteer your assistance to finish a group we already have started.

Cooler.

Created topics based off of some of our conversations when it comes to coming up with ideas for engaging the community and bringing in new members.

1) Definitely agree here. When I'm on my PC tomorrow, I'll go around clicking on all kinds of links and see if I can break things and how easy it is too navigate or find the information I'm looking for. I think a good idea for the home page could be if it listed the current most active RPGs instead of just a strict 9-12 that we have to rotate so often.

2) I like this idea, I was actually trying to figure out how to leave some groups earlier today.

3) Agreed. As we discussed, Insanity should be a good place to really work out Chimera Engine due to it's simplicity. Again, I want to see how much I can get done next week before I fully commit to it. As for which RPGs we clean up first, I think we really to think about what has the most appeal.

4) Created a topic for this.

I've been working conceptually tonight on some of the changes that need to take place with the site structure itself to make it more of a community than just a collection of RP boards. The first thing that will entail is the before mentioned restructuring of the homepage. Here's a link to the original concept for the layout I'm using http://dystopiapro.com/images/rpgs2.jpg which is probably what I will take it back closer too. What we use a homepage now I want to kind of merge into the directory so each listing there has recent posts and stuff like that. The homepage will go back to being a gateway into the site, though I will figure out ways to add some links to our biggest RPs and hot topics to the community forums and new additions to the network. We will also need to restructure the “community” area, which as of now is just these forums. I think just setting it up as a blog style page with updates and gateway links to all of the other areas, hot topics, top RPGs, etc sorta our take on the cpn main http://dystopiapro.com/images/cpn2.jpg