Man.
What great discussion going on. I am going to contribute my 2 cents to the pile of all the other cents and watch as it gets completely ignored and feels worthless, because that's what it feels like what happens whenever you contribute content to this ****** website. (censored word is synonym for poopy in case you were wondering)
I do not want to speak on behalf of the staff so I just going to say how I feel and now how the staff feel.
Getting to the core issue, of why the forums suck, it's honestly kind of simple. I wholeheartedly believe that there is a lack of care in what some say and post.It's such a horrible feeling when you post a couple lengthy bodies of text onto a thread you find really interesting only to feel like it gets ignored or glanced over. It's just sucks. I understand that the majority of us have a limited amount of time and it takes a while to make quality posts and to read other's posts. But way back when the forums were good, a main reason why they were so good was because stuff actually felt like discussion. You would post multiple times in a thread and started to form a nice dialogue. Nowadays here's how a general thread works.
>cool, neat, topic
>person1 contributes
>person2 contributes
>person3 contributes
>person4 contributes
>person5 contributes
>repeat until thread eventually dies out
Back when the forums didn't suck, there would be more of 1 and 2 banter and maybe 3 works off of 1 and 2 maybe. But all of that is gone. Threads just seem stagnant and no one really cares. What I am trying to get at is basically the lively parts of responses are basically dead. Now I know this is not always the case but it happens often enough to be considered a problem in my eyes.
And if you are looking at me and wondering if I think this is more of a member problem than it is a staff problem, Yeah that's what I think. To be frank, administrative stuff works only if there are members who are there to support them and when I make motm and get 6 responses, then I will not feel like doing the next month because no one cares. Sure the staff can contribute more threads and announcements but news flash, staff are members. What we say about members also applies to staff.
Now I know I am not the greatest of administrator's so idk what to do from the administrative side, but I have been at this website for too long, and I have seen it at its best and also at its worst. If you guys honestly believe that the website needs to get better, try caring about other people. It makes me upset how much you guys flame each other in arguments and I want to have a civil discussion about this issue. So I will be more than willing to respond to what you guys think.