Activity increased slightly in 2012, although the post count was about the same as 2011 if you prorated away the first two months of 2011 (when hardly anyone posted). Regardless, post counts were more normally distributed in 2012, and more consistent activity isn't a bad thing. If I had a little more programming ability, I'm sure I could automate this graph, but since I don't, I'll stick with making boring graphs every few months because I enjoy making boring graphs every few months.

As for another issue, I recently merged a couple of alternate accounts for Quickie-la and MarioBros101 so they had one account each. After talking to another member who had no memory of her account even existing, it dawned on me: People who make accounts here don't leave because they're busy with real-life pursuits or more exciting communities, as I had previously assumed - instead, a lot of them become inactive because they don't even remember we exist! I'm perfectly content with this remaining a fairly small place, but it would be nice if someone could figure out how to better retain members. Any suggestions are welcome, although I think free refreshments are the best place to start.

Contrats! The forum is certainly growing. Do have any idea what caused the massive spikes in 2011? I think in general, the posts are pretty consistent. It is interesting to see the fluctuation, though. What exactly is this graph plotting? Posts per month or week?

As for helping with growth, I might have some ideas, but no actual answers.
Pretty much everyone that comes here came from mfgg. This has positives and negatives to it. On the positive end of things, it is a much more tightly knit community and people get to know each other better. At the same time, people that are active here are likely also active on mfgg. Mfgg has a larger number of members and a more specific focus (mario, fangaming) than here. It also has another component to it - the main site. Because of that, if someone only had 5-10 minutes, they would likely go to the larger site. Also, if they wanted the most feedback possible, it is likely that they would post there instead of here simply due to the difference in numbers (although I notice that you attempt to reply to everything posted here, which I appreciate).

As for some vague suggestions that may or may not work -

Find something unique and fun to do here that will either differentiate it from mfgg or help strengthen the existing relationship between members, making them more likely to stay. Ideally, both.
Some regular semi-organized things are good too. This could include competitions, games, events, or things like that.
Other littler fun things, such as skins, help as well.

I could elaborate and come up with some more specific things if you think that would be helpful... I've already written a fair bit though so I'll leave it at this for this post.


Also, please note that I didn't mean any of this in a critical way at all. I really like the community here. I was just giving an observation that might help with your growth.

Thanks for the feedback - I really appreciate it! One thing I've wanted to do for a while is launch a mainsite for hosting an assortment of content (like a portfolio of my photos), although I haven't made very much progress on it yet. A mainsite is something I could promote more actively, although I'll want to exercise a certain degree of caution to avoid attracting the wrong type of members.

The graph measures half-month intervals. The main cause of the occasional spikes in activity in spring 2011 were a handful of lighthearted topics that got a lot of replies. The valleys occurred when our most active member at the time lost Internet access because of the spring tornadoes of that year (as well as some other members having computer issues).

I think a main site could be quite useful. However, I think it's important to be very creative and original with it. On mfgg, a simple 'upload sprites' system works because they are all based around the mario universe. Unfortunately, I don't think something like that would work here. You would get a myriad of assorted custom sprites that mainly won't be useful. Something like a 'sprite showcase' could be interesting though.
You could potentially pull off music, photos or games if your did it right though. Again, I think it needs another element apart from simply uploading and commenting on content. Like that, there would be no real way to sort content, and much of it would get lost. Just thinking about it, I have a couple of potential ideas floating around. Of course, I have no idea if any of them would hold water. I would be interested to hear what ideas you have. I might be able to help you with a couple ideas here and there if you want to discuss some time.
I guess the other big factor is actually creating the website. Unfortunately, my HTML knowledge is quite low. Are you (or is anyone else here) capable of creating it? I imagine that would be quite a huge undertaking...

This post outlined my plan for the mainsite. I made some progress on it, but I haven't done much with it lately, mostly because the default content management system wasn't an ideal fit. If you have any ideas of your own for a mainsite, I'd love to hear them.

Sure! From what I can tell, you want to go in a showcase styled mainsite. There are a couple of things to keep in mind for this. One of the biggest points is a question about how you will handle quality control. Will you have quality control at all? If you do, how do you gauge the quality of something like a photo or a song? While there are a couple of pretty objective guidelines to follow, a lot of it is subjective. If you don't have any quality control (or even if you have loose quality control to weed out the obviously intentionally bad content), the big problem is that there is going to be a lot of content and no real way to sort most of it. Of course, you can go by medium - song, drawing, game, photo, etc. - or artist, but once more content gets submitted, this can get difficult and a lot of really brilliant work could be overlooked.
I thought of a potential solution to this. What if you had a 'showcase' of some type on the main page of the main site? You could have site staff looking through content and picking the best stuff. Then every 2 weeks or month (or some other reasonable time interval) they would update the main page with the best content. Perhaps the top 3-5 things from each category. A way to make this easier is if you put a button on each piece of content that allows other members to 'like', 'favourite', or put a 'thumbs up' on it. Then staff would be able to look at the most popular things.

Another idea that could build off of this somehow (maybe) is if there was a theme released each month or so (sort of like a competition, in a sense). Contributors would be encouraged to make content (take photos, compose songs, create games, etc.) that pertain to this theme. At the end of the allotted time period, the same process would happen and the staff would decide upon a winner for the competition in each category.

I understand that this is probably a tad overambitious. Perhaps parts of it might work though. I also suggest it because it gives people an incentive to participate, as the main site won't work unless people contribute. Perhaps there could also be some sort of badge function on the forums to give people a reward for doing well.

Yeah, that's probably the way I'd do it: I'd showcase members' creative projects (games, music, drawings, photography, etc.) on a semi-regular basis, with occasional bits of forum zaniness to keep things interesting. I don't want the site to become needlessly complicated, as I've seen a lot of interesting ideas get abandoned once "feature creep" began to set in.

Yeah, for sure. It's just important to give people incentive to post stuff. I'm assuming there's some way to do a showcase styled main page with the site you have now?

The mainsite template has a "News & Updates" feature for posting that sort of thing, although I may replace the existing host with another piece of HTML software. In fact, I've contemplated making the entire site with the JaxBoards' custom pages, which would involve creating a home page and linking it with pages like this. This plan would enhance mainsite-forum connectivity, and JaxBoards' speed is a nice plus too.