Did anyone else notice that they suck? The writing forum has sucked for a good long time. The art forum used to be OK, but it's been sucking more and more lately. Almost no one posts in either of them any longer. And I've never seen so many threads with 0 posts than the travesty that is the poetry sub-forum. It's a real shame.
I think art and writing discussion used to be good back when they were all in one forum. Art discussion generally dominated the forum (which is why we split writing off into its own forum, I think, I don't really remember), but every once in a while some writing thread would pop up, or a nice book discussion, and it'd get plenty of posts. I think it was good because people who liked art would browse the forum, and say "Oh look, a writing thread" or "oh look, someone wrote a poem", and people would talk about it. And people who liked writing would browse the forum, and happen to see an art thread, and post. Whereas now, only people who are VERY interested in writing go in the writing forum, and people who are VERY interested in art go in the art forum, and there aren't many of those people here, so things are stagnant. If they were one forum, people who were vaguely interested in either of those would at least be in the forum and there'd be a better chance of people posting.
"So", you ask, "why don't you just post more in the writing forum yourself, you ugly dork?" Well, I absolutely love reading and occassionally writing, but I never go into the writing forum, because I know any thread made in the writing forum would die a horrible death of starvation, because no one would read it. Because no one goes in there. I think plenty of people at the MB are interested in such things, but the forums themselves and their atmosphere (or lack thereof) are holding things back. I do post in the art forum sometimes, but even then, threads don't get nearly the number of replies they used to.
As a minor point, I HATE having signatures having their own threads in the art forum. I'd love to see that disallowed, or confined to one huge sticky thread. There's a sticky thread to request someone to make you a sig, but people still make threads to show off sigs they've made, or web page banners, or stuff like that. I think it degrades the quality of art in the forum. That's an entirely subjective opinion on my part though, I'll admit. But some text and lens flares slapped onto a sprite or anime graphic you stole from some other site online isn't art in my book.
So I think we need to trick people into posting more, so to speak. I think the art, writing, and poetry forums should be combined into one. And I don't think sig threads would fit into such a huge and hopefully busy forum, so I'd love to see those zapped. We've tried things to make the forums better in the past, but usually the staff is too apathetic to pull anything off, and I can't blame them. I think the forums themselves are the problem. Combining the forums won't take any protracted effort on the part of the staff. It would also make it easier to moderate them. And the resulting greater staff presence could help keep things alive in there even more. Combine them and give it a nice name, that's my suggestion. What was the old name for the forum when they were one forum? I can't remember it, but it was a good name.
