The site needs fresh blood

It's been months now since registration was turned off and now I think the site is really starting to feel it. I log on on a morning and check the threads, usually there are very few. I log on at lunchtime, usually there is little new. I check in the evening, again usually little new. I've noticed a lot of us are retreating into their journals and when new threads are made, they tend to get less engagement than when I joined back in May. I feel like it would be a shame for this problem not to be resolved by November 1st, and the influx of new users NNN presumably brings. I enjoy talking to people on this site but it's feeling like a ghost town recently.

 

Glad I got a couple people to reply, and glad you agree. Normally when I post threads they get no engagement. It's frustrating trying to actually have proper conversations with people and they don't engage. Or posting comments on active threads and being ignored. I can understand conversations naturally fizzling out but I swear it's the same few people I see on this site who seem to acknowledge anything I post, and this has to be at least partly down to how few people are actually active. Last time I checked it was less than 50.

 

The message explaining it is still up if you access the site without logging in. At first I just took it at face value, but as the months pass, I'm starting to wonder if something else isn't going on. Not suggesting some grand conspiracy but it's very odd. Does the site not have system admins separate from the public moderation team? Could they not fix the issue by mass rejecting every new application to flush the system out so to speak and starting afresh? I'm not a technician but I'd have to imagine the tools the site admins work with are outdated if they cant do that.

 

It would be a real shame if the busiest time of the year for the site is missed and people looking for help cant get it. The alternative is the subreddit which is a cesspit. I have heard of the site being DDOS attacked before, maybe there is the risk of that happening again? Even if so, surely just killing the site by disallowing new members is doing damage too?

 

Moderation on a site like this is probably very difficult, there are probably many new accounts who do nothing but post porn until they are caught and banned. Then you have instances where users speaking English as a second language say stuff that could be construed as offensive and the mods have to decide what to do. Then you have the actual trolls, and the people who derail every thread they can find and use it as a platform to spew ideology. There are certain topics you straight up can't talk about because of this, even if they aren't actually against site policy. I think we all know what I'm talking about.

 

November 1st:

 

They probably don't have enough mods/admins, and while I don't know exactly how the site's back-end works, I have to assume it's possible, or they can make it possible, to just mass reject everyone in the spam filter and then reopen applications. I seriously doubt people who applied 2 months ago will suddenly reapply now. It would also be interesting to know what actually sets off the spam filter in the first place. I should say I'm not an expert on these topics but I know people who work with this sort of thing and from the way they speak about it, it should be doable, but I don't know what infrastructure the forum is even built on so I could be totally wrong. This could be a heavily modified AOL chatroom for all I know.

On an unrelated note, sorry to see you've relapsed.

 

Absolutely, I wish people would make more threads in general, stuff that isn't just bait or arguing.

 

Honestly I've noticed this too, even since I joined. People get suspended or banned for being slightly rude to each other while users who are blatant trolls get slaps on the wrist. Again I won't name names but we all know what I'm talking about.