[KlaraNovikoffa]

The problem with basing the forum on offtopic is you will not achieve critical mass

The issue as it relates to needing a focus for the community before expanding to conversation beyond the focus is similar to the paradox that existed when mtg was first created (I do loves me my paradoxes)

Richard Garfield knew that some of the broken cards in the original mtg set (Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall) would be a problem if the game got popular. On the other hand, if the game got popular then these broken cards would of course not be that much of a problem, correct?

Consider that ^. If the forum is has no themed purpose then it will not achieve critical mass. You need to declare a popular focus to get a critical mass of active/interesting people and then bang! you have a forum but unfortunately it has a focus for better or worse.



There are a few ways to go around this:

Evolve/disperse your focus over time (pojo)
pojo was oringally sert up as a pokemon board but hapily embraces every ccg that was released. currently yugioh has top billing over pokemon and 5 years from now if there is a new game twice as popula

Keep your original focus but put just as much effort to growing activity in non focus related areas like offtopic and social (mtgs, yf somwwhat)
mtgsalvation is a great example of this. they were originally create to be the spoiler central for mtg, but over time have grown their mtg section as well as their non-mtg section massively.

Try to specialize on the competitive/creative/casual aspect of your focus (dgz, channelfireball)
Try to lead not by quantity but quality. problem is you are only legit as long as your are respected for what you are claiming to be.



Imo the pojo approach, by broadening the focus across entire genres, minimizes the possibility for quality discussion that does not pertain to one of the many focuses. The second two are more ideal. The mtgs approach leads to a high volume of everything and the entire community must be moderated and encouraged or the entire site becomes pretty lame. The third approach works best in a walled garden (or staff article/blog) scenario where the weakest members can be eliminated to maintain an overall average memberbase quality.







tl;dr version: you need a forum focus to attract a memberbase in the first place