A lot of folks expressed an interest in having a forum where some of the lengthy debate people could go and sound off.
So the SoapBox was born, it seemed like a good idea. But we find it is struggling to stand on its own legs right now, nobody wants to start a topic in there for fear that it won’t get as much exposure as posting it in General. This happened in the Techie forum until it gathered enough steam to really keep itself going. So my question is: Pump life into the SoapBox or Kill it and replace it with another topical forum (cars, GOTD, The Visio and Microsoft Office Fanclub, etc).
Why not just add a bunch of forums!? I don’t like expanding a forum too fast and creating empty pockets. I’ve seen other forums do it and it just creates a sense of “nobody is home”.
How do you plan to pump life into the forum? I was thinking of doing the following. Let’s not kid ourselves, some of these “debates” in general are not really debates of any sort. They are flame fests where the only reason they keep going is because one side wants to one up the other side. WTF, this isn’t Mario Bros. And another forum setup to people being jackasses to each other would be redundant, we have that in General Discussion.
Ideas (just ideas)
* Create a group of people who want to run the forum. By run the forum I mean, start topics instead of whining about lack of topics, help spur creative debate angles, etc
* Weekly debate topics, posed by the group,. This would be more than just a link and the word discuss. It would need to start the debate off, pose questions. Topics would be relayed to the Mainpage each week with a link to the thread.
* Rules of Conduct (offical, unoffical, enforced, not enforced, whatever). Something you guys could at least try and follow as a guideline to keep things at least from just being mudslinging festivals. And something you guys would come up with.
* stuff * and some more stuff I thought of in the shower but forgot What do you guys and gals think?