This thread is not helping anything. It is a complaint towards new members, and less directly, towards the staff. You can achieve something with currently active users like that, but it will be useless in the long term.
Now, I'll try to address your remarks with the best of my abilities.
Yes, we should have stickies. Has been suggested for so long, but apparently tags and announcements are superior, derp.
No, it's not that. It's that the concept of "stickies" is difficult to integrate with a lively forum (hereby "lively" stands for "threads on the frontpage change regularly"). It has been a real problem on the old site, when the stickies overtook the entire over-the-fold area so that you had to scroll down every time to see any updates.
It has been previously suggested that a "Sticky" option should be added among "Popular", "New" et al. It is a suggestion I support, though it goes into the FAQ direction in the aspect that the FAQ link is perfectly visible, but still not visited.
Are you admins afraid to turn this site into the old one?
I am afraid to take the site back into a direction from which it becomes not maintainable once again by acting too quickly. Reacting to user suggestions snappily can result in throw-in, terrible solutions and spaghetti code. We'll rather wait it out, plan it out, and implement things when the time comes.
More like we took a step to the side and then a really big step back. We lost a damn lot of functions, and now, for whatever reasons, those are being re-made again - like profiles, for example. Lots of work and we are now just trying to return to where we were.
It has been a decision to focus on main function versus additional functions. The old site had everything: chat, forum, a twitter clone, a danbooru clone, bookmarks, profiles, I don't remember it all. Each one of this bunch was poorly designed (I'm not talking visuals, I mean architecture).
Now we concentrate on the forum and the chat, and will implement additional functions that are really needed for these two.
especially when the "popular threads" section doesn't even list those threads that are popular right now if those popular threads are older than, like, a week. Writer's Corner hasn't been in there for weeks, yet likes are growing pretty damn nicely, for example
Threads decay. It isn't "who's got most likes overall" competition, it's rather set to present the good stuff of the new stuff to people. The circulation depends on the rate of new threads and the number of likes threads usually receive. The effect would be a little more successful with more people upvoting regularly.
Also an obligagory tutorial would only do good. And just to be a pain in the ass I would vote for a bunch of "hey, listen!" annotations all around the site.
I like this.
For all of this, remember: Each and every one of the admins cannot work on the site full-time, though we're trying. For each and every thing some of our most vocal comrades up there demand, one or all of us have to find time for - and put in a lot of work.
Cheer on, Colorless.
Eugen
