[Stu]

You can do this and that but at the end of the day in order for the forum to be engaging and entertaining looking to prospective new members it needs to look like it actually has substance.

A few years back every thread was a conversation. A dialogue you could actually follow. It was like one of those forums you could read for ages and just be entertained by it, then sign up saying "Oh I've been browsing for ages and have only joined now, hello!".

Nowadays the place is just barren. It's this really thin skinned parody of itself. I mean there are still lots of really great members doing their best and a couple of good threads a week but a large volume of the forum seems to be just threads that follow this pattern of 'Hai' > '.gif' > 'ikr ' > LOL > '.gif' > +1>.

That's an MSN conversation. Not something that people want to actually sign up to be a part of. I'm not saying let's abolish all notion of casual chat - this is a level beneath casual chat even - but this is basically what the forum's become now.

That's my biggest problem with it. 90% of the threads I go in to I go out of again because I know what they hold. I log in a few times a day and am actually stuck for things to do.

It's just a general drop in quality, unfortunately. And it's something that's hard to fix because we only ban people for ... well ... breaking the rules which is fair enough.

Give it two or three years and it'll be a handful of us backed in to a cave desperately sharpening spears whilst a parade of BigBroIsTheBest1995s run riot outside discussing which singer is auto tuned the least.