Today, Smashboards crossed the 130,000 member threshold. This seems like a good time to offer an update on the site and various things that are happening around the Smash community. The health of Smashboards hasn't been this strong for many years and the last two months have seen a huge acceleration in features and site upgrades (thanks @Warchamp7). We still have some small issues to work through including getting a new support email, getting writers for our new news portal, and getting tournament moderators to help with the Smash Rankings, but many of these are good issues to have. One thing to note - we recently cleared all users settings for email notifications due to the excessive amount of emails being sent when it was the 'default on' setting - if you liked email notifications you can turn the setting back on by going to your preferences.
For the future we hope to pick activity up even future with more content, additional sponsorships (Apex 2014 and VGBootcamp were only the first), more comprehensive rankings, new staff, and support for all areas of the forum. What other things can we do better? What do you like about the site? Who or what should be sponsored next?
As always, if you like what we're doing, you can support Smashboards by going Premium - rumor has it that Premium Members have been getting chances at rewards of late like controllers, plushies, pens, and adapters.
By the numbers
For the future we hope to pick activity up even future with more content, additional sponsorships (Apex 2014 and VGBootcamp were only the first), more comprehensive rankings, new staff, and support for all areas of the forum. What other things can we do better? What do you like about the site? Who or what should be sponsored next?
As always, if you like what we're doing, you can support Smashboards by going Premium - rumor has it that Premium Members have been getting chances at rewards of late like controllers, plushies, pens, and adapters.
By the numbers
- Averaging over 100 new members per day
- Averaging nearly 5,000 new posts per day
- On December 17th, 474 members were added, the 2nd most ever in a single day (1st: Aug 10, 2011 - 725, 3rd: March 10, 2008 - 294)
- As of February 5, 2014: 130,000 members, 230,000 threads, and 14,420,000 posts makes Smashboards the 10th largest forum using Xenforo (1st - IGN)
- 251 brackets added to new rankings system in under 1 month (long way to go!)
- 5,670 tournaments posted in Tournament Listings since 2007 (810 tournaments posted per year)
) would go a long way towards making SmashBoards feel more like the home of Smash instead of splitting traffic between SmashBoards, FaceBook, and Twitch. With FaceBook in mind, I also think some instant messenger chat rooms for some of the major forums might be worth trying. For example, what would happen if the Melee Discussion social thread was an instant messenger/chat room thread? The biggest complaint most people have about forums is that they have to wait for responses. Having a select number of chat rooms for the more active sections might help encourage people to just hang out on SmashBoards and chat instead of coming here to do business then leaving as soon as they figure out when the next tourney is or w/e they really came for.
