Survey, then?
Should we ask people what they want? Prepare a short questionnaire perhaps? Something along the lines of what you do/do not like here? What you do/do not like on other gay forums that you visit? We can also try and see if we can get the "silent surfers" to reply. As I speak, something occured to me: it is not as simple to just pass through here and say something as it is in other forums! You need to register and go through a quite complicated process (relatively speaking, of course). The thing is (and here I am being a boring psychologist again...) this is quite a high threshold to cross for many people who might feel their privacy is being invaded, or that it is too much to commit to, etc. I mean this. So even if they find us in the first place, there are too many barriers in the way. Yaniv - do you have figures about hits on the site, etc? Maybe you can reach some conclusions from that, i.e. are there many visitors who aren't "biting", or are people stopping at the gate (you never get directly into a forum when you go to a new one, you first have to go to a page where they read you the riot act and tell you that you had better behave yourself from now on) and then, if you want to post a message, you have to go through the Spanish Inquisition... Why is that necessary? The internet is supposed to be democratic and accessible, but getting into this site is slightly less easy than breaking out of Sing Sing. Shall I start the ball rolling in another direction, while I'm at it? What I look for in a forum (apart from gay/les/bi) is some serious discussion and interaction, combined with fun and nonsense - to be perfectly honest, the way our old forum used to be. This place has that but in very small portions (due to low participation). I can't even say anything about the low number of women (which I soemtimes found a problem in the old one, but one I could live with) because there is also a low number of men... So what do you guys like (in a forum!)? The ball's in your court now... But get back to me about the rest of what I wrote too, please