putaro wrote:Kotik wrote:In all honesty, you won't attract too many new members, because we're all worshipping a product that has been ditched almost 7 years ago, so if anything, more activity has to come from already active members...
I disagree. I think there is still a significant amount of Enterprise Fan Fiction being written that could be posted here as well. ff.net doesn't provide much of a community for readers/writers, which is something that TRIS could focus on.
Of course there is still a lot of good material written, but I think it'll be hard to recruit new members for simple marketing reasons. We have our forum, which is a common feature of all relevant sites, except ff.net. Unfortunately that's where our main 'selling points' run out. Since I'm an entrepreneur myself, I tend to look at things from a marketing point of view. Let's have a look at the options that are available for the ENT fiction reader and author:
1. ff.net
FF.net doesn't have much of a community, but it is the best option for authors. You can publish yourself and even get detailled statistics about who reads what. This is why most of the authors publish there. Most of our authors do as well.
2. HoT
Although the site is dead, a lot of first-timers land there, because it tends to appear near the top of the list in search queries. I found TriS via HoT in 2009.
3. Delphic Expanse
Set up by some former TriS members, it features about the same services as our site, but apart from being run like a dictatorship, most of it's features are more convenient than over here. The publishing process is a bit more transparent, because people submit their stuff themselves. It is still reviewed by the administration, but one has the option of reviewing the status of the submitted text. The archive itself is somewhat cumbersome to use, but the reviewing process is much more sophisticated, especially with the option of author replies to comments. Our biggest advantage over DE is that we don't have a totalitarian administration and no censorship. My story "Words", which received favorable replies on both ff.net and here was rejected by the DE administration as not meeting their quality standards, so I think we are the better option despite the technologically less sophisticated environment.
4. Warp 5 complex
Technologically about the same standard as DE, the W5C is a viable competitor, although most people might be turned off by their huge amount of slash stories.
As we can see, we have three competitors for new members. Other smaller sites, like The Guardian of Forever seem to be inactive. So how do we fare against them? I'd say, from a marketing point of view, not too well. Our submission process is by far the most cumbersome of all available sites. Your submitted story might go up on the same day, but it may just as well take three weeks and too often stories appear misformatted in huge or tiny fonts. That's not down to laziness of all the volounteers in the administration team, but to the fact that too many steps are being done manually and the conversion software seems to be a complete bag 'o balls.
Our archive is simple and easy to use, but it lacks many features that are common at our competitors. If you look into our archive, you'll have no clue if an entry is a drabble or a multi-chaptered story. The genres as well aren't visible - only through a search or by opening the respective story. Our reviewing process is by far the least sophisticated and the most cumbersome of all competitors. Authors do not get any notification, have no way to reply and that's not even counting the horrible captcha thing and the fact that you lose your whole comment if you don't get the code right.
Our big selling point are the members. People like Silverbullet or Asso and his mediterranean flair are our biggest asset, but that doesn't count for new members, because they don't know them yet.
I've come up with a list of things that might make us more attractive for new members or for authors to come here from other sites:
- The review option needs urgent remodelling. By introducing a login process for the archive or tying it to the forum membership, we could get rid of the captcha and more importantly, it would automatically introduce the technical option of sending a notification to the author, when a new review has been posted.
- The submission process needs improvements. The simple option of adding pictures to stories and a slightly more detailed list of stories with basic informations á la ff.net and a better statistic might make us more attractive for authors.
- The database could use an audit. We've been hit by connection problems quite often lately and several comments appear under the wrong stories, which means some foreign keys have been set incorrectly, which is due to the fact that MySQL doesn't support foreign key constraints, unless tables are stored using the InnoDB engine.
I've started programming a prototype for a revamped archive that I'll present in March, maybe that would be interesting for our programming team. I think that, if we provide a more convenient package, we might motivate more newcomers or established authors to come here or come back respectively, because like everyone else here, I'd be very sad if our favourite hideout would become deserted.
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. But in all seriousness, obviously many members of the admin staff have had other diversions to pull them away from the work. I went through a period of boring, uninspiring employment that made it easy to be here every day. Now that I'm a full time graduate student, teaching and doing research and planning two international weddings - it is, admittedly, quite difficult to keep TriS priorities on the calendar sometimes. In the short term, the alarm bells have been sounded by some of my indispensably good friends - and I'm committed to getting things back on track. In the long term, we'll have to try and rebuild our moderator roster with some active people.
, that's a big part of it really, is the 
Okay first things first... 
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