All right, people. This will be difficult, since I personally know that laziness is a hard thing to overcome, but let's try.
As we know, TDC is losing blood, by which I mean that more members seem to be leaving than returning, and activity is undoubtedly suffering in due part from it. One reason for this is college: Many of us are getting caught up in our college lives that we don't have as much time to join anymore. Of course, a part of this may also be laziness or a loss of interest due to less stuff to talk about other than random things in the Chatboard (which is still good fun, mind you).
This is why I say we should bring blood back to the desert. New blood. Blood with interesting things to say. Deep down, we all know this, but we don't talk about it much. Sadly, I think this will only hurt the site if we don't do something, so I say this should come to an end soon before the activity loss becomes unrecoverable. I personally wish that the bots would be replaced by actual human intelligence. You have the same wish, too, yes?
Aside from there being, admittedly, a slow influx of new content, I think a part of the reason why few new people are coming is that people don't know about us. We should fix that; it gives us more people coming and, at the same time, encourages them to stay (some people have left due to the lack of activity, see). Two birds, one stone.
Any ideas as to how we should approach advertising?
Steal the Decleration of Independance.
Come, now. Be serious. :P
Well, I plan on making a series of videos on Skyward Sword. The problem? Our computer is freaking out and I'm not sure I wanna bring up the editing software. I'll be getting a laptop soon, hopefully.
Good, good. We'll need more content.
As for my idea, I thought maybe we should raid other forums with advertising policies and maybe e-mail webmasters.
I'm kind of taking a page from Zelda Dungeon, but they have a Youtube account full of site updates, video walkthroughs and other stuff like that.
As was mentioned before, the site needs a "killer app" to draw people back to the site.
We need to try to bring the Caption Game back for this purpose. That's been out for...years, I'd say. However, I think we'll need something new, too.
Ideas, anyone?
Go to other Zelda forums and tell them to join.
Yeah, I've tried that and most other forums are not happy with us doing that.
Should we try affiliating with more sites, then? If we do that, though, I highly recommend we build up a slew of content beforehand. We may need more administrative access to get it done, since KP may have his hands tied too much otherwise.
KP/Jack will need to provide more than one user with FTP access to the site, and administrative access to the entirety of the site's files. This way as we pump out content for the site we won't have to wait for one specific person to get on. This isn't a complaint, just an observation.
As far as revamping the site for massive user influx, we need to update everything. All guides, all maps, all strategy and theorycrafting. We need to provide at the very LEAST a weekly update on Skyward Sword. If there's no news, we'll discuss what we already know about it in a new light. Provide guesses, observations, possible strategy and implementation of what we know.
We'll need new features, yes, but before we get started on those let's get what we already have back up to snuff.
Say, can you FTP a site through an SSH client? If so, then I guess I'm already ready. I'll just need the server info.
In case we need to get that far, I do have two ideas for new content: a custom, downloadable game (maybe via Zelda Classic) and a Let's Play. I do have a capture card, so assuming the connection's good, we can all join in the commentary as I stream the video. It would probably be best if there were more than one person or two doing the latter, since, admittedly, I am no good at doing entertaining Let's Plays by myself; I'm usually too much into the action to think of witty things. However, if there are more people there, maybe that'll help split my focus a bit.
We'll have to figure out who will be doing certain things on the site primarily during the content buff. Ask Ezlo, Caption Contest, guides, Skyward Sword stuff, all of that. (Another SandCast wouldn't be a bad idea, too, wink wink. ;) )