This forum needs something to draw people in

[komfyrion]

We are all of course painfully aware that network effects make it very hard to get people to move from one social platform to another. I think we can all agree that the purple discord is the most lively international FaB online discussion space and that it is the obvious place to go if you want to talk about this game with other people. Getting people to use this forum is made even more difficult since the discord arguably has a forum inside of it already in the form of threads.

I think this forum really needs something that makes it stand out as a useful tool for communication. I think casual chit chat cannot be its focus, since that is covered so well by discord. I don't have any experience with forum management, but I think it could be a good idea to try to look at other successful forums and try to see what it is that makes them work. Competitions? Plugins and tools? Integrations with relevant data sources (RSS feeds, live streams, etc)? Interesting community leaders being present? Gamification (things like karma points or other made up incentives for active contribution to the forum)?

I suspect longer, in-depth guides and discussion is the thing that can really set the forum media apart from things like discord, so one thing to figure out would be how the forum's structure can best encourage that kind of engagement.

Discord and Reddit are slowly enshittifying, but it's not bad enough yet to push large numbers of people away, so we can't rely on that alone.

[komfyrion]

One thing I've noticed is that knowledgeable people seem to be posting guides on Metafy and monetising them, and then drip feed little tidbits of knowledge here and there in the discord. I don't expect the pros to reveal all their hard learned secrets for free, of course. It's just something to take into account. The guides we would see posted publicly here are probably not going to measure up to the monetised Metafy stuff, so trying to make long form guides a major thing here could potentially be a mistake.

[U_Mage]

been preoccupied so haven't had much time to do site things metafy is definitely eating into that space but I'd still like to offer a spot for people to write longform content like that if they want, whether hero guides, strategy, or meta, a rathetimes-esque

Definitely need something to stand out though. With the discord panic on the backburner I wonder if age-checks eventually starting will drive more attention