Regaining Focus

I'll be honest and say my activity on this site has nosedived because I'm not a fan of the redesign. The issues I brought up in February haven't been addressed (I'm not even sure some of them can be). The generic comments log is a problem I feel is instrumental in the site's sluggish growth. It's unruly to try and track where new comments are being posted now.

I do agree that it wouldn't hurt to try to branch out, but trying to create a community based on a nation or language would be costly. I am currently on a site where it is split between English speakers and French speakers and neither communicate with each other. 

In those cases, it's really because it's looking into the unknown, trying to solve the big mystery, combined with the morbid fascination where we want to look away but we can't, which is similar to why people like horror media. As for children's media, these are things we grew up on, and they've often influenced us, so we want to know exactly why and how this happened (Sorry, couldn't help the psychoanalyzing).
Really though, the big things that would have taken over the wiki like Clockman and Cracks and ADWSS would have been Doraemon and Sesame Street 847 (and Snuffy's Parents to some degree), which would have been a tad different type of search since they're known to exist and we know where they are, but it's legalities that stopped them. At this point, we'd have to 1) wait for their respective rights holders to decide if they'd like to release the, 2) have an inside with the rights holders to help persuade them to do number 1, 3) wait for them to become public domain (which is impractical), or 4) hope that someone posts them online somewhere and hope they're not discovered/discovered after they're already very widely circulated.

I think that part of why there was so much focus on ADWSS was that a lot of people from outside of the forums/wiki joined in specifically for that, and then when it was over, they just left. That's not something we can control as much, and we can't control if they don't want to stay after it was done.

We definitely need some sort of community project. I don't know if a big search will do. However, the important thing here is making this a more tight-knit community.

I don't know if Dycaite can do more LMW retrospectives, so that can be done on a rotation. Put them on a dedicated YT channel.

An e-magazine sounds like an interesting idea. Although, wouldn't it take away from stuff like the notice boards?

When Paul mentioned articles penned by the staff, is it like lost media articles or is it more like a blog? (Again, a magazine kinda takes away from that idea)

More content from the staff sounds like a good idea, but the staff are, ironically, the people with the busiest lives outside of LMW

Just a little two cents from me-

I still think if there was more of an organization to the threads in each board it might help a little with the participation or interest in a certain topic.

For example I've been posting a lot in the Made in Point Richmond thread, but it's been a few days and now its already halfway down the page and threads about Minecraft Alphas, a laptop with old scripts, some Pig Pen game, etc are all before it- meanwhile they have nothing to do with animation or Pixar.

I guess what I'm suggesting is that there be more genre-focused boards similar to the categories on the main site, where people who are interested in a particular genre can just go to town without having to shift through stuff.

There have been many times before where I've either forgotten about threads or don't feel like scrolling through all the stuff I'm not interested in when I want to see what people are talking about in threads/genres that I'm interested in.

And in the case of people who might not know a search is going on, this would be a great way for extra exposure and could lead to certain threads getting bigger within each genre board, so we can have multiple "big" searches at once instead of just banking on a new ADWSS consuming the entirety of the forums. 

I tried not to format that as a complaint but its just something that I've always felt the forums could benefit from, but I guess I'm not even sure if that's possible.