This forum is dead - the change hasn't worked

Cruzado
Member Offline
This forum used to be lively and full of discussion when it was open/anon. While I understand that the change to require people create user accounts was well-intentioned (and I went along with it without complaint), I can't see any way to sugarcoat it --- it's been a complete failure. The board is dead. For whatever reason, it's just a step that people don't care to take; perhaps it's general laziness or perhaps it has to do with not wanting to create a pattern of posts that would allow others to guess at who their kid is (because mostly this has been a forum for parents of soccer players) but the reason is sort of irrelevant. The result is that the board is dead.

Even during the height of soccer season, there is basically zero discussion of anything. And it's a negative feedback loop: people stop visiting because there are fewer interesting posts to read; less people visiting means fewer people to potentially post new threads or comments to existing threads; etc.

It's true that people can post annoying or insulting things here on occasion, I had been following the board for a few years and never really saw anything egregious. There are many other forums on this website (e.g., check out some of the public school forums!) that face the same issues but do not require users create login accounts. Was this one really that bad?

In any case, I'm respectfully putting this out there so that the admin(s) can consider it. It's just a bummer to lose what used to be a lively forum for soccer in the DC metro area.
fpyc2006
Member Offline
I agree with the Original Poster. The login name requirement has completely killed what was once a lively and informative Forum. Sure you had to sort through the noise but it was not that hard to do. People should be less thin skinned and there was a lot of real misbehavior by soccer professionals that was called out in this Forum.
Blutarski
Member Offline
Meh. Both have their pros and cons. All things considered, I'd rather have it this way. IMO, if you can't tolerate the marginal risk of being identified, you message probably isn't worthwhile to share.
soccer_dc
Member Offline
I also think it's better now. There is still a decent amount of activity. When you filter out all the troll garbage there used to be, there wasn't much more real activity than there is now. It's still anonymous. I don't know who any of the posters are and can't trace usernames to real people. Maybe the admin could trace to an email address (assuming people use their real email addresses) but that only becomes necessary if you are doing something inappropriate
Mdmom22
Member Offline
Yeah, I like it better now. Previously, it was just a dumpster fire, probably just a handful (or less) responding to each other, and a lot of wading through garbage to get to helpful feedbacks and insights. The tone of the threads are also less arrogant. That said, if a separate, anonymous Girls ECNL/GA forum were to be created, that would be fine. I suspect a lot of the threads that went wayward would fall under that forum.
jsteele
Site Admin Offline
Posts of this sort belong in Website Feedback rather than this forum.

When I decided to require users to login to post to this forum, I accepted that it might cause the death of the forum. Therefore, the fact that the forum is considered by some to be dying is not a convincing argument to reverse the decision. That was an acceptable outcome then and remains an acceptable outcome now.


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