gimmick: a trick or device intended to attract attention, publicity, or trade.

hook: a thing designed to catch people's attention.

shtick: a contrived and often used bit of business that a performer uses to steal attention

This place is pretty quiet. I know @orchids is / you are still working on this place. My intention with making this thread is about sharing ideas for getting some more liveliness. This is a weird subject because I'm of the opinion that these kinds of things need to arise organically, naturally. BUT: I'm also a bit of a "fake it 'till u make it" kinda guy. I believe this duality makes for an interesting topic, regardless of whether we want to apply anything we discuss here to basement community.

In the share your website thread @NovaVeles shared their site: Ideas, Thoughts and Concepts. One of the quotes that's stuck with me was #86:

"The more one tries to appease the masses, the more boring the result will be. This is not a fault of the people but the fault of broad aspiration."

Is basement community suffering from "broad aspiration"? Please understand, I am not insinuating this is the only challenge at play here. Just one I've been reflecting on.

What do you guys think?

i definitely thought about this a lot when i was developing the site. i thought there would for sure be more of an interest if this forum was centered around a specific topic or theme. during my time researching other forums, i saw a bunch of really niche communities around things like cars or art, for example. i mean, https://forum.bodybuilding.com has kept their forum going a really long time being centered around fitness, and https://forums.somethingawful.com was all centered around being a comedy site and they're both still doing great over a decade later.

i don't really have a great answer for this. i think my ultimate opinion is perhaps a theme will appear organically and then we can build a community around that, but i get that's easier said than done. i think that's a bit harder to accomplish just because of the sheer amount of subforums here - i feel like if someone visits the site, they might be overwhelmed. But than again, https://knockout.chat seems to be doing just fine as a relatively new general-purpose forum.

really my only goal for the site right now is to create a nice place for people to hang out and chat normally. i also have a personal goal to keep writing more at https://basementcommunity.bearblog.dev more and attract more like-minded people

FWIW, i am having trouble prioritizing building the community over making the site better. there's a of things I either want to change about the UI or features i want to add (that are already supported by the API), but i think community-building might be the better thing to focus on right now.

This is your project, I think it's very important that you follow your gut / focus / priorities. If you feel more enthusiastic about working on technical aspects, go for it. I brought this topic up, but I want to clarify that I'm a firm believer in "Rome was not built in a day." - There are no shortcuts... I think the most dangerous thing is that you run out of steam or get demotivated. "Success is when hard-work meets opportunity." Here's a related blog post I recently read: 'It Happens All At Once'.

I just find it interesting because I'm more used to encountering a cause with no place, rather than a place with no cause. A blank canvas of sorts, perhaps? Art can be anything, even a freaking blank canvas, but I think people would still have to identify, connect, with it.

"Welcome to basement community. We don't know what you're doing here, either."

Personally, I'm incredibly curious to see where this place will go.

I would like to nominate a temporary "Western"-theme. I would suggest that a cowboy hat be placed on the owl and that 'general' be renamed to 'the saloon'. I suggest this because, clearly, basement community's theme is in its Wild West-phase. A new frontier! We are a small startup town with comings and goings.

if you want to make a photoshop of the logo, i will absolutely add a feature for rotating logos and open it up to anyone who wants to take a crack at one

Based.

I've seen many forums with a rotating "banner" feature, displaying user-submitted content

Time to dust off the adobe

get me a 100x100 transparent png and consider it done

Wow it is weird seeing me quoted out of context! But yeah even having a rotating banner would be kind of cool!

perfect. i got some code to randomly pick from a list of logos ready to go in the next deploy

e: deployed. it should show up 33% of page loads. i added your username as credit in the alt text, but maybe i'll think of a better place to put that if we get more in the future

Well, how about a theme that supports the name of the site? I vote for a basement theme. I am thinking (this may be US themed) of the 70s basement with wood paneling, flower pattern couches, barely any light. See below.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/d7a9a9e7-e906-488c-af84-af4631e81633

Basement Community: The Supper Club of the Internet?

what is this forum? what is it for? why does it exist? why are you here?

there's an advertisement on SomethingAwful.com for this site, and i wanna know why

well the main reason i created it originally was to see if I could re-make something awful, but modern and completely handwritten, instead of using existing forum software.

but now i think the goal is to just build a nice lil community around all kinds of topics. i know there's niche forums out there and this one is more general, but i still think places like this can provide some value.

That's thar basement you've got there is too lit for my taste, yup spits

Being a chill place to hang out is a good gimmick IMHO

Yeah, it was a bad choice in picture since it's too bright. The rest were so dark as to give a 'rapey' vibe, and I don't want to do that.

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I know this is an old thread but I might have some ideas here...

I don't know if you remember this, but Something Awful didn't always have Automative Insanity and all the other subforums it has today. GBS didn't used to be a collection of megathreads. It was literally anything and everything went in there. the subforums only popped up in response to GBS moving too fast. You might consider that smashing everything down into one board about everything.

I know exactly what this feels like. I still don't have a solution for it. I think it's why the most successful communities are run by people that don't spend any time thinking about software at all. But that just takes all the fun out of it for people like us.

edit:

just realized https://basementcommunity.com/?view=all_threads solved the problem of many boards once you know about it. But it doesn't necessarily account for the psychological effect it has on users when there are a lot of boards or channels that are infrequently used.