Firstly let me say sorry, i realize this is ~1-3/4 years old, but i'm sort of curious if this site overhaul is still happening? ...the site doesn't look any different than how i remembered it? apologies for butting in, but after reading
this and the
preceding thread i couldn't resist giving my 2 cents.
my main concern is that a major site overhaul could possibly(+probably) make it a lot more difficult for people on older hardware to access the site(where as new computers will still load a basic SMF forum). I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of people doing pixel art on older spec machines, and also with special/custom-software-setups(probably also out of date) on older hardware & OS. I'm concerned you would be cutting out a sizable portion of the user-base. Perhaps I am just biased because I am sort of one of those people myself(I know it's a "security risk", but life doesn't leave me enough time to keep everything updated, and new and always backed up). I'm really concerned any site overhaul could seriously change this place, and not necessarily for the better.
That said, maybe I do agree with the assessment that traffic here has been kind of depressed more recently; and there are certain things it would be nice to fix around here, which I think if fixed would make the whole place more attractive to users. For one the News/Activities/Featured list at the top under the banner never changes, and some of those threads are 4-5 year old. Perhaps it would be a good place to start by occasionally updating the featured threads. other than that I don't think the site needs much change(maybe more activities). perhaps someone could build an associated wiki or blog that could run in its own subdomain, along side the same SMF forum; kind of like other sites do:
https://www.sfml-dev.org/index.php https://www.tigsource.com (I suppose instead of a blog you could make a gallery)
...actually there are a number of possible improvements which i think could be made without replacing SMF, like
pretty url's or
post/topic thumbnails.
you mentioned user appreciation: perhaps you could add a leaderboard based on most posts+replies(+options like month, year, all-time), though from my experience on reddit and stackexchange, it's my opinion that adding karma and rep doesn't necessarily improve things. As for personalization: I like how pixelation already allows others to view all posts by a given user, I'm not sure adding a follow button would really change much(also it might fracture the community)...perhaps better profile pages would be nice as mentioned.
About sharing: it might be good to look into "facebook og(open graph)" and "twitter cards", although I sort of disagree with adding like-buttons and such(just puts me off)...also about offline reading, I'm pretty sure SMF supports xml/rss-feeds, so that's another shark down.
IMPORTANT: activities & challenges are a good way to attract interest, you should have more of those(but not too many; every week is too much) ...and more time for submissions(72 hours is asking a lot from an amateur) I don't really understand why the hex corpse is on pause; if maintenance is an issue couldn't submissions and deadlines be structured in a way to minimize this? I really like how the collab's here are conducted properly(no peaking), I think it leads to more creativity from the participants.
...anyway, a few more sub-boards would be nice maybe(idk)?...search does need improvement i guess...and it might be good to do something about all the old threads with dead link images...this is all coming from someone who doesn't use Discord(just fyi).
So apologies for the long rant, I'm just concerned the site is going to change, and I won't be able to use it the same way anymore... i know, how selfish of me
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