Meh, I could list you off at least 20 members who troll these boards, more than enough to start a good debate.
What the boards are lacking are a few bad guys to get up peoples backs and get them posting i.e Laughinman, Football777, Stella. It's just too goody goody.
The chatbox is killing all the small talk and if something big happens like the shootings there last week, the chatbox is getting spammed to bits. That thread should of had 20 pages in the first day.
If you owned the site, or had the opportunity to do so, what would you do? The Elite membership has few perks and very few new (or even) established members people pay for the subscription. Earlier this year I bought Ali, Matt and Iron Elite membership as I believed they'd benefit from access to Chatbox with the amount of time they spend on the site.
I myself spend bloody hours of each day on this site, thinking of new things to breathe life into the site and posting my brand of crap to keep the cycle moving. The problem is all the best ideas equate to diddly if you don't have the membership to support it. The core community is the PES section, now even more so. Its a mixture of demographics who just aren't interested in Elite membership or any additional perks. The best debates, trolling, spamming, idiocy and arguably some very concise posters inhabit the PES section.
The off topic section is dying because - and having having spent hours reading years worth of material - posters in the off topic section aren't kids anymore, they've grown up, moved on and become disinterested. For me if you want to get new characters in or bring old ones back you have to appeal to those crowds.
The forum does look rather tired, personally I've no issue with the layout but when you visit other forums you notice the difference. Its startling. However as ownership currently stands, the site will not change because its part of a network of sites. i.e it remains static until it becomes no longer viable to operate.
Personally I find Chatbox useful for the Fantasy Footie but thats just me and Chatbox is usually the last place I visit anyway. I think if you get rid of Chatbox its harder to justify Elite membership - let alone sell it - without replacing it with something worth while. Get rid of Chatbox, well may as well get rid of Elite and setup user groups.
Yes Chatbox is detrimental to posting on the site but not to a scale that affects the site drastically. It's certainly not harming the PES section as no one is interested in chatbox (or Elite). I appreciate that years back the site was certainly more vibrant, the amount of lost personalties is a shame but the off topic section is less frequented by even you Dundon's, so really, what would you like to see here to encourage you to post more, aside from the removal of chatbox or older members returning?
