Okay, so as we all know I've been around forever and I'm a mod now. I've been fixing a bunch of technical issues (and I found one that looks like it can't be fixed without migrating the forum again so I'm just leaving that one alone).
As part of my forum support duties, I'm branching beyond tech support and have two questions for all of you. I don't care how long you've been here or how many/few times you've posted, I am welcoming all input.
Yay for Nanshork!
Question 1: Is there any functionality that people would like added or changed? This could be something big or small, as an example the Dice Roller and Bookmarks are features that were added to the forum.
More built-in smiley options.
Question 2: Is there anything that we can do to stop forum activity from being so low? Should the Mods mod more (it would be hard to mod less)? Should I hack into GitP and forward all of their traffic over here? (I can't actually do that.) Should we just give up because nobody wants to talk on a message board anymore? Logins aren't super low compared to what I remember historically but people just aren't posting like they used to.
Moderation seems fine as it is, but there's no easy hack to increase activity, basically you need constant content updates of some sorts to generate activity.
Not to brag about, but I'm probably the most active homebrewer here and a significant percentage of people joined this forum precisely to post about (or even for) my homebrew. But I just don't have that much free time nowadays as I used to.
GITP has a pretty awesome webcomic that updates regularly to initially draw people in. Somethingawful has their articles. Even TGD has FrankTrollman regularly post massive awesomely funny rants of rpg stuff split in multiple parts so people keep checking in the forum and eventually talk about other stuff while waiting (or even try to do big rants of their own).
So if you want more activity, you simply need to start this forum's very webcomic or series of articles or a youtube channel or something else that'll draw people in the first place.