Note that subject line is meant to indicate unanimous awareness most people fervently want Chat, so reiterating that desperate desire is needless.

Further note the question is NOT the product of any ongoing nor even preliminary consultation with Ben, that is, I have NO idea what, if any, consensus threshold would prompt suggested changes, nor even if Ben would be willing to make ANY given that he has other and growing responsibilities. It is mainly a matter of my morbid curiosity and only a product of concern "if nothing has CHANGED, then NOTHING has changed:" The site in its current form has been dying on the vine for a while, so it feels like some means of increasing both participation and membership is vital to ensuring we do not end up right back here in short order. Even if someone sponsored RAFO indefinitely, I am 99.44% certain NO ONE wants it to be no more than an empty shrine to the memory of lost wotmania.

With all that out of the way, I will share a few ideas of my own:

1) Dump the MB split (as much The Shrikes idea and others as mine; I do not know who had it first, because a number of people recognized the problem fairly early.) When threads were getting pushed completely off peoples pages in a matter of minutes, the split was logical and necessary, but as it stands, sparse activity on 6 MBs looks even emptier than sparse activity on 1 (roughly, oh, 6X more.) It amounts to a division by 0 error, and many (though not all) people are like me: We RESPOND to far more threads than we CREATE. Believe it or not, I feel self conscious about posting multiple threads back to back—but if no one has posted ANY new one in DAYS since my last one, it is often that or continued silence. Which brings me to another suggestion:

2) Each of us could make a voluntary non-binding commitment to both create and reply to at least one thread per day. That is not a lot, but if even the dozen or so people who came back just to say they are not ready for RAFO to end yet did it, site activity would increase by at least an order of magnitude. Increased activity is not just an end in itself either: The more contributions there are, the more RAFO comes up in search engines when NON-MEMBERS google random stuff, and newbs are what we need more than anything. I did not find wotmania through a friend or on another website: I wanted to quote a specific verse of Jak o' the Shadows in a post I was making on a political site, googling was much faster than leafing through half a dozen books trying to find the right verse, and wotmania was the top hit. It could as easily have been Dragonmount, in which case I probably never would have met my wife, so our daughter would not exist.

3) A different them than the "books" basis that probably has hundreds of other sites already devoted to it and better established; that is more of a "division by infinity error." I am not even sure what to suggest, and would hesitate to do so anyway since it ought to be something on which most everyone already spends a lot of time. That, IIRC, is how we came up with Needing a Bigger Bookshelf, but that is just too broad and we get lost in the crowd. We need, IMHO, a niche; if a broad one then a VERY broad one so we can afford being hard to find in the morass; if narrow, then something whose small following borders on the fanatical (pleasedon'tturnintoafurrysite, pleasedon'tturnintoafurrysite.... ) Lots of MBs are still thriving in terms of both membership and participation, but they have something that generates lots of in depth discussion so lots of people keep coming back for more. We have book reviews anyone can get on Amazon (and in greater quantity and variety,) plus a MB for a series that ended several years ago and stopped being really good about over a decade ago.

4) Keep it civil, stupid. And yes, I suck at that now too; I will redouble my efforts to give people the benefit of a doubt and stop letting new discussions suffer from old arguments. I always say, "Please don't eat the newbies," but the same applies here: No one (or at least few people) want(s) to walk into an online brawl, and if THAT is our sole "niche" no newbs will stick around to become valued and valuable midbies.

5) Nested/Paged thread toggling. I know it CAN be done, because the Admin over at Scandinavia and the Worlds forum did it (unilaterally, no less; thank Ben OUR Admin does not do stuff like that) a few months ago, and in the OTHER direction. It was surreal seeing everyone bitch and moan about how much nesting confused and disoriented them, and rather comical since the obvious response was simply "then change your options back to pages, idiot." Likewise, clickable html tags would be awesome. However, I realize that RAFOs architecture is a custom job rather than off the shelf, so I cannot know how much WORK any of this would take even it is technically POSSIBLE.

Okay, now ya'll try.

Just to be CRYSTAL clear, I am NOT trying to push Ben into anything here, only concerned that "if you keep doing what you have done, you will keep getting what you have gotten." And we know what that is, so I hope we can collectively REJUVENATE the site rather than simply maintain it on life support a few more months. For that matter, two of the above suggestions (i.e. regular contributions and a civil tone) do not require Ben to do a thing: They only require each of us to do our part for him and the community.