Just my two cents worth. And I do expect change back.
If I were serious about this the first thing I would do would be to approach the PTBs here, I’ll assume the Chicago Reader, and offer to take over maintaining the board as a contractor. You could then make whatever changes were necessary to make it stable and efficient, effectively starting from scratch without having to start with a completely clean slate for members and content.
If they weren’t interested in that, I’d then try to offer to buy it outright and then do the same thing with rebuilding the board.
What keeps boards thriving is new membership. Old members, no matter how devoted, tend to drift away eventually and you need new members to keep the place vital. (and, to a certain extent, these boards have stagnated some with the advent of Pay to Post and a drastic reduction in new membership) The Straight Dope column and books are the hook that get people onto the site to discover the boards.
Without a compelling reason for new people to visit, any spin-off board is doomed to whither away.
Yep. I frequent two of them, but for different reasons than why I come here. My smaller boards are my “family” boards, and this is my “big, raucous block party” board.
There’s several SDMB spinoff boards started by other Dopers. The reason why these boards hasn’t achieved phenomenal success, IMHO, is that their identity is too closely tied in too much with their owner. When I visit them, it’s not as if I’m visiting a public “third place”, but rather someone’s living room. It feels like there’s an underlying “cult of personality” to the spinoff sites, and they seem to lack a sense of permanence. The boards more reflect the owners’ personalities rather than the collective culture of their users.
Look at most successful boards, and you’ll find that their identity isn’t necessarily connected to the individual responsible for starting it.
Straight Dope Message Board: not “Ed Zotti’s Agora”
Something Awful: not “Lowtax’s Forum” Offtopic.com: not … well, whoever.
I run a somewhat successful message board for urban planners. I don’t call it “Dan’s Place”. I don’t have my name up everywhere. I want the community to feel like it’s something that belongs to them, not me … even though it’s understood that I own and run the place.
Cecil is always relevant, he’s that still, small voice that reminds you that if you post that, that smug asshole you cannot stand will be there two seconds after the edit window closes, with incontrovertible cites proving that you are a total shit-for-brains with no clue what the hell he’s talking about…
