Sorry I didn’t see this thread until more recently. I’ve been absolutely SLAMMED with stuff to do over the past several months. As a result of that, there wasn’t enough time to do everything on my list any given day.
The good news though, is that this situation is already improving. So it should be easier for me to keep better track of things as my workload starts to normalize. I’m actually thinking about taking a few days off here and there, and the fact I can entertain that thought is a good sign!
For me, my current “needs” for this forum and site are as follows:
- I want the Wordpress comment system completely disabled, it’s a spam target anyway.
- But I still want people to be able to discuss videos.
- I need one place to manage discussions on this site, to help consolidate the workload
For those reasons, I implemented a system that automatically creates a new thread per video. The Wordpress comment system is bypassed, and since the forum handles all comments, I have one place to manage discussions. So each box is checked.
However, I see the point - a lot of empty posts certainly doesn’t look good, and that’s not ideal. So I’m open to other ways of solving this. If there was a way to create a forum post only when someone goes to comment, that would be the best! Then, no topic would ever show up unless someone wanted to comment.
The slow adoption of the forum is definitely my fault. At one point, there was a scammer her used my photo and posted racist things, pretending to be me. For that reason, I implemented a user approval process. But unfortunately, with the way my workload was, it would take me a few weeks (or longer) to have a chance to check in here, so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the users waiting for approvals just gave up.
But now that my workload is becoming much much much better lately, I feel I can do a better job with managing the forum. But I still don’t want to manage it all by myself, so I need to come up with a system where people can help if they want to, or at least share ideas for how to do things better.
I’ll prepare a volunteer post as soon as I can. I’m thinking that I’ll create an admin channel within the Discord chat where I can be notified if something needs my attention.
So be on the look out for a volunteer post for those that might be interested, but in the meantime, please continue sharing thoughts here 