I think I'm probably one of the posters talked about here in that I have had accounts in the past, now abandoned because I can't remember passwords/emails for them, which participated in one game or half a game and then dropped out. I like the atmosphere here, but I felt the major problem was speed and hierarchy: it takes an immensely long time to enter a game here, it takes a long time for the game to start, a day runs for
two weeks
, which is the longest I've ever known in any mafia community and can become intolerably boring on occasion, and so on. The hierarchy point is the restrictions which are put on creating games. I came here because I played Mafia on other forums, enjoyed it, and looked for a more focused community; but then I find it easier to participate in and create my own Mafia games in the forums I started in! I get that there's a trade-off between Wild Wild West style of everyone being able to do everything and the quality dropping versus a relative guarantee of quality mafia games, but if you are looking for membership, I think the rules have been excessively tightened to the point they are really hurting you. All of this might not actually be the case as of this post; it's my experience from probably about a year ago now, but I was just thinking of rejoining and saw this and thought I'd put in my 2p. Make games shorter and give people more control over the games they actually want to play and more people will stick around.
EDIT: Oh, and I think I first looked at this site in like 2010(?) (Yes, I'm a habitual lurker and lapser) so maybe I didn't think of it as much, but the forums are really ugly. It looks like an amateur operation instead of a site which puts out some really interesting posts about how to play Mafia.
EDIT2: I made a super quick mock=up of a 'modern' MafiaScum, using the NeoGAF forums as a base and then adapting because I think they provide a particularly good example of a well-run community with an attractive website. There is also a white theme, but I used the dark because I'm cool like that:
If you just focus on chamber's post, as I didn't alter the others, I think it seems a lot more clean and accessible. I would have liked to have used Helvetica rather than Arial as the font but I'm laptop only not PC atm and don't have Helvetica currently on my ,laptop.
