Elijin said:
I mean, you say they're contradictory views, but I have gotten very little response, even the pushback I did have puttered out to a sort of 'I agree with a lot of what you say, if not how you say it'...
No, the general consensus here is that they definitely think the "freedom of speech" angle/approach is hokey, but they've disagreed with pretty much everything else you've had to say.
So lets sort of jump about here. Growth. Growth is a real problem because you dont offer anything unique, or have a unique identity. There's no way to arrive here except by being specifically led here by a user, or knowing it exists and seeking it out. In the year(?) since you re-vamped this place, I have tried to find a few times, and been unable to. The title is super generic making it a real pain to google. Even knowing the site exists, it clearly only gets placement due to my having actively been here over the last 48 hours. Shit last night before bed I tried to check on my mobile, which didnt have the site in its recent history, if you'd replied. Spent 5 minutes googling, failing to remember exactly what variation of sanctuary this was before finally googling your specific user name.
The problem of not being able to find us isn't really our fault though. Google actually used to drop us to the bottom of the results due to us not having HTTPS implemented at the time, but that's since been fixed. Now it's much better. If you google simply "sanctuary forum", we're the sixth result down. Not that great but passable for now. What is annoying is if you change the "forum" to "forums", we get dropped a lot further down. It gets even weirder too. Try googling "free speech forum" and Google won't give you anything related to a BBS. As to our domain, well, sanctuary.com is, of course, taken already. We could move to sanctorium.nl, but I feel that wouldn't be much better. Maybe even a little worse. It would also be a big pain in the ass to set up.
As to your complaint of us not being unique, I get that we may look kind of generic, but the reality of it is we are
FAR from generic. No site offers exactly what we offer at all. In fact, most sites offer LESS THAN 50% of what we offer. And trust me, If you can tell me a site that does at least a lot of what we do, I will HAPPILY close up shop and move the community over. But I think I can guess what will be the result of that. You won't find a site like ours because a site like ours is either so obscure as to be buried too deep in the internet to find or it simply doesn't exist.
No, Elijin. We are quite alone.
Unless you're ready to make a big branding commitment, and generate a community of some kind around that niche, I dont see how you even approach that problem. Because a site needs to have a "thing". And your current "thing" (freedom of speech) is swallowed up by alt-right nonsense websites and communities.
You say that like there are a ton of alt-right racist/homophobe/sexist/etc. websites and communities. If so, where are all of them? At the bottom of the internet pits where you have specifically do a Google search for them to even have a chance of seeing them?
The "wanky" is the websites taglines and the... creative flair of naming some of your subforums. Even your own members are starting to say they're a bit on the nose. We get what you were initially going for, but it's time to let the medium carry that message and think of a new one to define the community.
Fine. How about "One Forum to Rule Them All"? That'll be especially true once I implement a XenForo license and really pimp this forum the fuck out somewhere in the future. Because that's what it's meant to be.
All in all, I think you have one or two valid points, but even those, you don't offer much in the way of alternatives. Also, I need to bring everyone together and see what they think about a different kind of "branding".