Hi folks. Wanted to check people's appetite for growing user base. We are now quite a small group relative to where we started, and always diminishing. We lost folks like YVa and Klaus in recent years, Goon has gone quiet of late etc., and it's noticeable the smaller the group gets.

If folks are interested in growing the group again, would be interested in discussing options, and contributing towards it. I use this and have tried the forums that Arseblog and Arsenal Vision have. Those places can get thousands of people on for a game and have a real energy. But there is one thing this forum is so much better in - the ability to have actual conversations on both football and other topics. The newer forums/discords seem are outcomes of our social media era where attention spans are short and young people are losing interest in reading, writing and critical thought. So this is a special place in that regard.

Some ideas

  • we could reactive old members with a mail campaign, e.g., ahead of the Real Madrid game
  • do social media advertising on platforms that have similar profiles to users here - Facebook, Reddit, etc.
  • collaborate with some of the independent podcasts that do not have a platform/are not part of a big media group to sponsor a segment/contribute insights (eh @RocktheCasbah might have ideas)

Interested to hear thoughts.

    Claudius some basic things might help. Something as simple as posting new thread OPs or old thread necromancies on Arsenal Bluesky, with a link and invite to join to continue the conversation.

    Adding even 5 regular posters would make a difference. 20 would be a massive change, but I'm very much open to it.

        Yes, let's do what we need to do to keep this Arsenal fan collective going. Also thanks to Pep for everything he's done so far.

        I personally like this place a great deal, even the people I fight with. It'd be a shame to lose touch in this day and age.

        I know it's been discussed a few times but I'd favour another technology migration for the forum, probably to Discourse, a relatively well supported forum technology still in the vBulletin lineage (rather than being more of an IRC-alike technology like Slack or Discord).

        It has an easily affordable official hosting option, off the shelf full text search and official Android and iOS apps.

          Burnwinter seems you don't get a custom domain until $100/month level? I don't know our stats, but is 20k/month page views enough?

          Other options include a Digital Ocean droplet - they have a one-click install for Discourse. The annoyance might be the mail server? Looks like there are lots of solutions, though.

              Coombs I think it'd probably be as "easy" to set up and run on Digital Ocean as Flarum has been for Peps, the main job would be the proper migration of the content and users, and setting up a sexy OMITT theme etc. That isn't necessarily a small job, I've had a look and it's the usual story where one or two people have hacked a script that helps together, and the rest is up to you.

              I like Flarum a lot and advocated it, but as these things tend to go it looks as if the project has slowed down. Discourse has more and bigger corporate users so it probably has a brighter future.

              On the other side, a platform that's open enough you can actually get directly at the database seems vaguely important for us, it would be a shame for the OMITT archive to get walled into a closed platform.

                  Burnwinter if we moved platforms then it seems Discourse on DO would make a lot of sense in terms of cost, archiveability, and accessibility (social sign on, mobile app, etc.).

                  In the meantime, I don't see why we couldn't start poaching users from other platforms who might appreciate a more "local" feel to their international online communities. It's probably just a matter of someone taking on the task of regular posting in strategic places.

                      Coombs I think the ads are definitely a nice idea, no idea how to craft them or where to put them but others probably have a clue. Agree there's no reason to make technology / promotion tasks blockers for each other.

                        Burnwinter I know it's been discussed a few times but I'd favour another technology migration for the forum, probably to Discourse, a relatively well supported forum technology still in the vBulletin lineage (rather than being more of an IRC-alike technology like Slack or Discord).

                        Why? I think flarum works well for our needs at the moment for the most part, what benefits do you see from moving to another forum?

                        I agree that the user base needs expanding but don't really have the energy to do anything about it. Would love someone else to take the baton though. There's still money in the kitty for it.

                            Pepe LeFrits Firstly I don't think it's urgent or if it'd be the right call.

                            Otherwise because of the reasons I mentioned.

                            Postgres-based, full text search capability (I feel we miss this). Also performance generally—check how quick pages load here after the initial page load (that's the CFL forum which uses it, but there are lots of others in the showcase here).

                            It seems to have become a bit of a clear front runner in the category. The code base has very high activity and it's currently used for community building by lots of huge companies. That's what gets you relatively solid mobile apps and so on.

                            No silver bullets but hey …

                              I just had a look at Google and we're on the first page for arsenal discussion but only page 3 for arsenal forum, so I've tweaked the working on the intro pages to see if we can move up a bit. Might help.

                                Pepe LeFrits -- tweaking the title tag and meta descriptions will help. Would also recommend the team thinking through where we can generate some backlinks from. I believe a few posters also blog on the side - could they offer backlinks from their sites?

                                and/or could a partnership (even if paid) be made with a well established Arsena/soccer website happen?

                                Maybe guest blogs could be produced based on some of the better/longer posts made here?

                                  Ok, bots are now signing up and flarum amazingly doesn't have any out of the box functionality to stop them. Who wants to setup Discourse?

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                                          Burnwinter I don't get to have an opinion given how little I post these days but xenforo like AM uses is brilliant. All the perks of a traditional forum like a proper search function, DM functionality and good legibility plus it looks great on mobile.

                                          Also you can post pictures direct from your phone and it doesn't embarrass you when linking online pics like some internet-disabled boomer.

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