How can we breathe some life back into the forum?

[BearBoy]

And some proposed solutions (excerpts):

Reviving a niche community like Boss Area in 2026 requires moving beyond the traditional "bulletin board" model to compete with the immediacy of social media and AI. To "get the conversation moving again," community members can implement several high-impact strategies:

.........

• Weekly Challenges & Polls: Start recurring low-effort threads like "Photo Friday" or "Rig of the Week" to encourage quick, visual updates.

.........

Is it possible to start polls on the forum? Can't see an option anywhere but might be missing something.

[Pepe]

I have not posted several times because the content just seemed trivial at best.

I doubt that your contributions could ever be regarded as trivial!

[Pepe]

Is it possible to start polls on the forum? Can't see an option anywhere but might be missing something.

No, our forum doesn't seem to support any polls as others do.

Oh, I just found something. In the "Welcome" category you can create a poll if you start a new thread. But only there.

[BearBoy]

I don't seem to have that option, Pepe. I wonder if you've got additional powers being a Mod/Admin?

[Pepe]

Certainly. Right now I'm working on enabling the poll function for all the members.

[BearBoy]

Certainly. Right now I'm working on enabling the poll function for all the members.

[Pepe]

Okay, I found out that registered users have already had the permission to vote in polls and to change their vote. But only administrators were able to create polls - in the one forum section that I mentioned above.

I have changed it so that administrators can now create polls in every forum section. I didn't change the forum permissions for regular users. So if you want to have a poll in a forum, you can ask me to create one for you.

[BearBoy]

Thanks Pepe.

Will have to have a think about a poll topic that might be interesting for people.

[bigtone23]

I have not posted several times because the content just seemed trivial at best.

I doubt that your contributions could ever be regarded as trivial!

Aww.. thanks!

[Admin]

Most users ever online was 3290 on Thu Aug 07, 2025 3:58 am

The forum is being inundated with bots and other connectivity issues. That takes ups bandwidth, data, and sometimes limits the capacity of viewing the site. Increased bandwidth risks raising server cost increases. The bots goal is consumerism, to the point of breaking the site, which leads to everybody leaving for the bigger sites like Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube where consumerism is the main goal, already achieved.

(This website does not run ads, never askes nor accepts donations, and never will.)

A profit driven trillion dollar industry is hard to compete with. Just existing is the fight, free from ads. All I can do is keep the site up, until it breaks under the weight of a flood of bots, and you abandon ship just to get "onboarded" (or shanghaied) to a big social media site.

Beyond forum problems: How many new rock bands exist in the past 20 years? Hollywood between 2000-2015 was bought up by private equity firms, hedge funds, etc which then dropped bands from their labels because they only wanted single pop stars, not bands. It was all about profit. Not as many new people want to be guitar players, because they aren't influenced by it anymore.