It's difficult to pinpoint any one thing as a cause for the slowdown. My theory is it's a combination of:
1) More people use mobile devices. The site itself is not very mobile-friendly from a UI perspective & forum mafia is not easily played on a phone.
2) Alternatives. For the longest time, we were the goto place for forum mafia. Even though other communities played the game, it wasn't their niche. We've fallen behind a bit here with other sites offering better game automation.
3) SEO - it's not as strong as it once was. This is likely due to the first two points as well as Wiki falling out of date. Out of date info means fewer people link to us. Fewer people linking to us means lower search rankings.
There's a whole slew of things we can do to make improvements:
1) We need to upgrade the board. We're currently on a very-outdated 3.0.x version of phpBB. Upgrading to 3.2.x gives us a nice mobile responsive layout out of the box & allows us to make modifications much more easily.
2) Automating the queues to some extent - makes it easier to see what's coming up & allows us to begin tracking some stats, and also opens the door for...
3) Moderator tools. Even if we merely automated vote counts, the gameplay experience is greatly improved & eases the burden on the supply-strained moderator pool.
Just getting those 3 things done will put us in a much better place.
Beyond that, there are a lot of other things we can do:
- Fix up the home page. I've been watching things like a hawk lately, and a lot of people drop off either right there, or on the graphic. I say put the info from the graphic right onto the home page.
- Fix up the Wiki. T-Bone has recently taken point on this, so .
- Automated PM to new users explaining what to do. We lose a lot of people right after they activate their account. I have no proof for why, but my suspicion is they're overwhelmed with what to do next.
- Email/PM users who don't return after X days. This could just help retain people who have forgotten about us.
- Better social presence. We've had next to nothing here up to now. We've recently started ramping up our & accounts. Again, keeps people engaged if they don't visit the site for a while.
- Email newsletters: Maybe every 1-3 months. Keeps people engaged.
Longer term goals: Our main offering here is forum mafia, but if we expand to other areas, it gives us a new pool of players to tap into:
- Implosion had the idea of building a "xylbot" type tool right into sitechat, allowing people to play games in there. I think this is a great "low hanging fruit" project we can tackle relatively easily.
- Other realtime app - building an app out on an entirely different part of the website.
Anyways, that's just what's been going through my head for the past month or so on this topic & the path I think we need to take. But obviously I've been in the trenches so it's great to see what other people view as problem areas.