Roch2001 said:
I think people just choose not to frequent the forums, which is a loss, I would much prefer a more active politics and propaganda forum, although it has been fun of late anyway :icon_rolleyes:
If a more active forum is desired, it will require doing away with heavy moderation, which I don't see happening here.
When people try to control the direction of a conversation in a thread through moderation (rather than persuasion), as opposed to letting it flow naturally as normal real life conversations do, it gets to be overly constraining and not worth participating in.
In an environment where people are told: "don't post here, don't do this, don't do that, don't reply, don't discuss this here," what you will eventually see is that people just won't bother to post at all. What is the point if you can't converse in a way that is comfortable to YOU?
Any forum which has rules based on the interests of the moderators, rather than the interests of the player/user base, will be less successful than a similar forum with less stringent moderation.
Moderators should rarely be seen on a forum, and VERY rarely use their administrative rights, if they want to ensure an active community that promotes growth. Don't get me wrong here - there definitely needs to be moderation, it's simply a question of balance that needs to factor in the community, desired goals of the site, and purpose of the forum.
If the administrators of a given forum are happy with a smaller amount of participation and don't care to attract as many members as possible, then what they are doing is proper for them.