When 4e came about I was very excited and told pretty much every person I knew. One of those people was a casual friend through an IRC channel who had given up on D&D after disliking the 3e rules. What he saw of 4e encouraged him to give it a shot.
What he found was that finding other gamers was a nightmare. Ye olde "post a message in a game shop methodde" simply didn't exist anymore as there were a tenth the number of game stores that used to be around and the ones that were, really didn't have an RPG focus.
So he had to resort to creating a "meetup" group. This worked, for the most part, but it also cost him money. Being a back-end web developer himself, he finally realised he may as well just make his own site. And Australian RPG Dungeon (link in my sig) was born.
Since it's inception, we've gathered 371 members. We've been very diligent about deleting spam (well, as a mod/admin, I have been) joinings so I'm fairly certain at least 90% of those members are legitimate. Considering that the SOLE advertisement for the site is the link in my signature, which most people say gets top ranking when they do a google search for 'Aussie RPG' or the like, simply because it's on this site and this site is so popular.
Now, to my point. Despite what I consider to be a successful membership drive and despite the fact that the only advertisement is that one link in a forum signature, there are obviously loads of Aussie gamers who have trouble finding other Aussie gamers.
And yet, that's not what the most popular feature of our message board has been. Hell, we're lucky if we get more than a post a month in the regular, open forum categories. By far, our most popular feature has been offering people their own, private, forums. We have anywhere between 20 to 100 posts a day in the private forums (as a mod/admin, I still see the posts there... whether I want to or not). We have almost a dozen groups who have their own forums.
That's huge when you think about the numbers involved. 370 people, divided by roughly 5 people per group, for roughly 74 groups, which makes roughly 16% of the groups who are involved in the board, wanted a private forum. And that's from an obscure bit of text offering a free private forum hidden in amongst the other board rules/welcome to posts.
So... my idea to boost subscription numbers is to offer a free, not necessarily private, but separate forum for... say.... gold level members. Probably only have to have one gold level who would be the 'owner' of the private forum but you could possibly also limit access to only subscribers. If you advertised that as a subscription benefit, I reckon it would be a massive hit, and would be a substantial reason for why people would subscribe.
Of course, I have no idea of the level of implementation required on these boards. I know that it took me all of five minutes or less to setup private forums (at least, it did once I figured out how to do it in the first place) for people but I don't know who you have to do that, or what software requirements would be like to link it to subscribers only. Given my limited understanding of the nature of forums such as these, however, I don't think it would be too hard to implement and could possibly even be automated in a fashion like the blogs are.
What he found was that finding other gamers was a nightmare. Ye olde "post a message in a game shop methodde" simply didn't exist anymore as there were a tenth the number of game stores that used to be around and the ones that were, really didn't have an RPG focus.
So he had to resort to creating a "meetup" group. This worked, for the most part, but it also cost him money. Being a back-end web developer himself, he finally realised he may as well just make his own site. And Australian RPG Dungeon (link in my sig) was born.
Since it's inception, we've gathered 371 members. We've been very diligent about deleting spam (well, as a mod/admin, I have been) joinings so I'm fairly certain at least 90% of those members are legitimate. Considering that the SOLE advertisement for the site is the link in my signature, which most people say gets top ranking when they do a google search for 'Aussie RPG' or the like, simply because it's on this site and this site is so popular.
Now, to my point. Despite what I consider to be a successful membership drive and despite the fact that the only advertisement is that one link in a forum signature, there are obviously loads of Aussie gamers who have trouble finding other Aussie gamers.
And yet, that's not what the most popular feature of our message board has been. Hell, we're lucky if we get more than a post a month in the regular, open forum categories. By far, our most popular feature has been offering people their own, private, forums. We have anywhere between 20 to 100 posts a day in the private forums (as a mod/admin, I still see the posts there... whether I want to or not). We have almost a dozen groups who have their own forums.
That's huge when you think about the numbers involved. 370 people, divided by roughly 5 people per group, for roughly 74 groups, which makes roughly 16% of the groups who are involved in the board, wanted a private forum. And that's from an obscure bit of text offering a free private forum hidden in amongst the other board rules/welcome to posts.
So... my idea to boost subscription numbers is to offer a free, not necessarily private, but separate forum for... say.... gold level members. Probably only have to have one gold level who would be the 'owner' of the private forum but you could possibly also limit access to only subscribers. If you advertised that as a subscription benefit, I reckon it would be a massive hit, and would be a substantial reason for why people would subscribe.
Of course, I have no idea of the level of implementation required on these boards. I know that it took me all of five minutes or less to setup private forums (at least, it did once I figured out how to do it in the first place) for people but I don't know who you have to do that, or what software requirements would be like to link it to subscribers only. Given my limited understanding of the nature of forums such as these, however, I don't think it would be too hard to implement and could possibly even be automated in a fashion like the blogs are.
