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I had an epiphany in the shower this morning.
For five years I've been trying to create the same forum experience I had back in the early 2000s. Back then it was so easy to run a forum! You'd just slap one up on the Internet, and the people would find your forum, register, and post. It was a happy place. Sure, the more successful forums had a vision, maybe even an official mission statement, but even me with a loose concept of being a fan shrine to an anime character was good enough to have regularly participating members within a community.
Fast forward to 2020. I tried again. I had the passion. Anime + Role Playing, means that I'm not trapped within a specific fandom, which in reality is only temporary anyway. I wanted to have room to grow, to explore and try new things that I'd fall in love with. Because that's what happened with my first site. I had a really strong affection for a character in a specific anime, a television show that happened to be, not main stream popular, but popular enough within the subculture of the Otaku (anime fans). But as the years passed, I was pointed to other anime, specifically shoujo (girls anime featuring heroines) that really got me excited. But I re-branding is never an easy option. Anyway, so this new site, was left totally open, and would feature all the anime and role playing games that I'd experienced. It would be a place for people to come together to discuss these things-- we'd share similar interested, and bond and form friendships , and junk. Right? After five years of struggling with hardly any member growth, and a dead community with a bloated, ancient looking website, I had reached that crisis point. It's time to rebrand.
I thought long and hard about what makes me tick. Yes, I do enjoy anime and role playing, but what I had wasn't working, it was too unfocused. And therefore, it was difficult to create an identity, which is necessary for marketing and finding other like-minded people. Something that a forum desperately needs-- like oxygen for us human beings. After all, a dead forum mind as well be a blog or maybe a static webpage. It took watching an anime for things to finally click for me. I'm obsessed with genre of magical girls. Pretty cute and vivid heroines, coming of age stories, awesome abilities and powers, and enough tense drama to occupy even my level of chaos seeking boredom. Thus, Prismatica was born. A magical girl's role playing paradise.
Here is a space where I can focus on the genre of magical girls within an anime sphere, and host a dedicated role playing game as part of the site's identity. Having recently stumbled onto the concept of dedicated forum role playing spaces, this structure allows me to create parallel concurrently running settings for role playing to take place. This solves the problem that is so frequently observed with Play by Post role playing. If a player goes missing for a substantial period of time, the game stops and ultimately dies. And defining the site as a genre specific topic point, rather than a specific media title point, will give me room to experiment and expand, and if need be, start other games-- because I do have a passion for creative writing.
Prismatica gives me that identity and branding potential that I was missing from my previous forum. Now it's much easier to write advertisements and to find other like-minded people. I have a classic color palette to work with, font styling, naming conventions, all of which help to put together a polished and coherent object for presentation. This solves the fundamental problem I had-- an identity crisis. But that's only half of the equation. Now I need to actually find other people! And for that, I have a strategy as well.
People initially judge something based on looks. And while I was comfortable and familiar with SMF as a forum platform, it was lacking a lot of the little things that I was simply adoring while using other sites' platforms. I was also concerned with how little development seemed to be happening with the software, and looking at the selection of themes available, only a couple had recently popped out to me. So, I did what any aspiring forum admin would do. I went joy riding! I quietly tried out several other forum platforms, and made a list of features that I wanted, placing emphasis on the writing experience. With each forum I tried, I was eventually lead back to XenForo, but that price tag was a hard pill to swallow for somebody who had experienced the joy of running a forum on the free-side.
With my vacation around the corner, I made my decision. I was going to build, build, build and have fun doing it while relaxing not at work! I applied for a credit card, and got approved for $300. Just enough to get me started. Yeah, I know, putting a hobby on credit is a bad idea, but I have a plan for that too. So all this previous week, I fell in love with the XenForo software. I managed to get the add-ons that would help make a role player's experience next level better, while keeping the site fun, yet not completely wacky. Phase One, complete.
But what about this epiphany? That comes with Phase Two: Attracting members.
I knew that word of mouth advertising is the best form of advertising. So I started talking about my forum (my old one that was), and tried to promote it on other sites that I would visit: Facebook, Reddit, and other forums, whether they be discussions dedicated toward anime, directories for role playing, administration of forums... And I wasn't really getting anywhere. Because this is the problem. Look at what these other places cater towards.
Sorry this turned into kind of a rant, but I thought it would be a good idea to share the magical thought I had this morning, as it could be useful advice for anybody else who's struggling getting their forum/site off the ground. (Note, as I wrote the title to this post last, I'm not entirely sure which Tag is the most accurate.)
For five years I've been trying to create the same forum experience I had back in the early 2000s. Back then it was so easy to run a forum! You'd just slap one up on the Internet, and the people would find your forum, register, and post. It was a happy place. Sure, the more successful forums had a vision, maybe even an official mission statement, but even me with a loose concept of being a fan shrine to an anime character was good enough to have regularly participating members within a community.
Fast forward to 2020. I tried again. I had the passion. Anime + Role Playing, means that I'm not trapped within a specific fandom, which in reality is only temporary anyway. I wanted to have room to grow, to explore and try new things that I'd fall in love with. Because that's what happened with my first site. I had a really strong affection for a character in a specific anime, a television show that happened to be, not main stream popular, but popular enough within the subculture of the Otaku (anime fans). But as the years passed, I was pointed to other anime, specifically shoujo (girls anime featuring heroines) that really got me excited. But I re-branding is never an easy option. Anyway, so this new site, was left totally open, and would feature all the anime and role playing games that I'd experienced. It would be a place for people to come together to discuss these things-- we'd share similar interested, and bond and form friendships , and junk. Right? After five years of struggling with hardly any member growth, and a dead community with a bloated, ancient looking website, I had reached that crisis point. It's time to rebrand.
I thought long and hard about what makes me tick. Yes, I do enjoy anime and role playing, but what I had wasn't working, it was too unfocused. And therefore, it was difficult to create an identity, which is necessary for marketing and finding other like-minded people. Something that a forum desperately needs-- like oxygen for us human beings. After all, a dead forum mind as well be a blog or maybe a static webpage. It took watching an anime for things to finally click for me. I'm obsessed with genre of magical girls. Pretty cute and vivid heroines, coming of age stories, awesome abilities and powers, and enough tense drama to occupy even my level of chaos seeking boredom. Thus, Prismatica was born. A magical girl's role playing paradise.
Here is a space where I can focus on the genre of magical girls within an anime sphere, and host a dedicated role playing game as part of the site's identity. Having recently stumbled onto the concept of dedicated forum role playing spaces, this structure allows me to create parallel concurrently running settings for role playing to take place. This solves the problem that is so frequently observed with Play by Post role playing. If a player goes missing for a substantial period of time, the game stops and ultimately dies. And defining the site as a genre specific topic point, rather than a specific media title point, will give me room to experiment and expand, and if need be, start other games-- because I do have a passion for creative writing.
Prismatica gives me that identity and branding potential that I was missing from my previous forum. Now it's much easier to write advertisements and to find other like-minded people. I have a classic color palette to work with, font styling, naming conventions, all of which help to put together a polished and coherent object for presentation. This solves the fundamental problem I had-- an identity crisis. But that's only half of the equation. Now I need to actually find other people! And for that, I have a strategy as well.
People initially judge something based on looks. And while I was comfortable and familiar with SMF as a forum platform, it was lacking a lot of the little things that I was simply adoring while using other sites' platforms. I was also concerned with how little development seemed to be happening with the software, and looking at the selection of themes available, only a couple had recently popped out to me. So, I did what any aspiring forum admin would do. I went joy riding! I quietly tried out several other forum platforms, and made a list of features that I wanted, placing emphasis on the writing experience. With each forum I tried, I was eventually lead back to XenForo, but that price tag was a hard pill to swallow for somebody who had experienced the joy of running a forum on the free-side.
With my vacation around the corner, I made my decision. I was going to build, build, build and have fun doing it while relaxing not at work! I applied for a credit card, and got approved for $300. Just enough to get me started. Yeah, I know, putting a hobby on credit is a bad idea, but I have a plan for that too. So all this previous week, I fell in love with the XenForo software. I managed to get the add-ons that would help make a role player's experience next level better, while keeping the site fun, yet not completely wacky. Phase One, complete.
But what about this epiphany? That comes with Phase Two: Attracting members.
I knew that word of mouth advertising is the best form of advertising. So I started talking about my forum (my old one that was), and tried to promote it on other sites that I would visit: Facebook, Reddit, and other forums, whether they be discussions dedicated toward anime, directories for role playing, administration of forums... And I wasn't really getting anywhere. Because this is the problem. Look at what these other places cater towards.
- Discussion about anime, sure has people who enjoy anime, they enjoy talking about the latest and greatest anime available, and maybe sometimes a classic. But they're there to talk and debate.
- People on role playing directories might be looking for people to role play with them, but primarily on their own forum, and the discussions are about making your forum a better role playing experience for others.
- Administration Forum, like this one, most of the people probably couldn't give a rats-butt care about role playing, let alone anime. We're here to discuss growth strategies for our forums.
- Popular mega-platforms on Social Media, like Facebook and Reddit, I've found don't convert into memberships. They're happy getting their dopamine burst by posting an endless onslaught of me-me-me posts or worse yet, debating the political circus we have going on right now.
Sorry this turned into kind of a rant, but I thought it would be a good idea to share the magical thought I had this morning, as it could be useful advice for anybody else who's struggling getting their forum/site off the ground. (Note, as I wrote the title to this post last, I'm not entirely sure which Tag is the most accurate.)
