Createspam, Createblog has created a monster Options

[NoSex]

Alright. I have noticed recently that these boards have been suffering from an obscene amount of spam and one on one conversation based posting. The entire vibe and feel of the boards have, in my opinion, reached a kind of low. The debate threads are more stagnant than ever. The lounge is a waste of time. The entertainment threads suffer any kind of in-depth or worthwhile posts. It just seems like the community boards are really beginning to suck.

The problem is, how would we solve this problem?
Do we need to punish those spammers? If so, will traffic decrease to a useless degree?
Maybe we can try to attract some older parties?
The debate thread could become exclusive. But, then it might actually become entirely stagnant.
The idea for an art subforum seems to be a push in the right direction.
Or maybe I should just find a more suitable community board?

What do you guys think?

[push kicks]

Or maybe I should just find a more suitable community board?

i would explore my options, nothing wrong with posting on more than one forum. here's my theory.

you see, cB's high point was when designers like roxanne and trish got thousands of page views per day, and advertised createBlog on their wildly popular xanga pages. there has been a mass exodus since. i myself left for a few months and when i returned, all of the contributing members left and we are left with 12 and 13 year old spammers.

what do we do? our biggest draw is of course the layouts and scripts we provide. we used to be the number one site for xanga layouts. i think we have been dethroned now in the age of myspace. we need to go back to our 'deisgn site' roots, and attract more visitors through offering better myspace skins and scripts.

When cB starts to get more stricter, it's when people get bored with it & leave.

sure, cB rules have gotten strict, but lets not confuse cause and effect. cB did not cause people to leave because of the strict rules; spammers and dumb posts caused cB to get stricter rules. now strict members? that is another story.

i think that the gap between member groups is getting too big. we got those who go off topic in every single post, those who type proper with a condescending tone, and 'dumb members'. there's a small middle class. just like in economics, the middle class sustains the board, and we have none.

It's never a good sign when someone starts a thread with "v1" in the title. I really hate multiple versions of threads like this in general, though. It didn't used to be that way.

at least that ensures conversation. it's true though, the whole board is filled with stupid threads or threads that last 6 versions. this happens because of lack of creative heads and because all the good members left. so i think we need to go back to our 'design site' roots and attract members that frequent our site because of the myspace skin and scripts section.

[*mipadi*]

at least that ensures conversation.

You're confusing "lots of posts" with "conversation". Conversation is an interactive experience that naturally grows and evolves over time. Many threads are with lots of posts is simply a long queue of posts with no interactive element—which is the crucial part for building a community.