Hullo,

Lately on the forums I have seen a lot of complaining about the traffic levels, and contribution from other members. I think it is about time we re-grouped and set down some things that we would like to see implemented or changed on the forums, hopefully leading to either a more attractive site and/or more active members. There was once a day when talkfreelance was literally my most visited forum ever, I want to see that return. I'm going to go ahead and post some of my ideas, but ideally I would like others to contribute to this thread, and hopefully someone will take notice of the ideas. Try and keep it as constructive as possible and with no personal attacks, or anything that could spark another of our joyous hate-filled threads.

In my opinion the downfall of talkfreelance was based on a few things, and it's the basics of the web - there is a lack of content and active users on the forums. I will be gladly proven wrong, but I've never seen an advertisement for talkfreelance on any other site, which I feel would be crucial in order to gain some more members and keep up there with some of the bigger forums / freelancing communities. I'm calling for a marketing campaign, that is serious nothing like the talkfreelance 3 M's ... which got us nowhere. Also leaving users with a positive experience and wanting to come back is pretty key, so members need to stop flaming each others threads and some immature people need to be banned, on a really overly strict 'lay down the law' type phase where we increase the quality round here. In turn with more visitors the content will arrive, but in the mean time someone needs to provide that content and at the moment, all the big wigs hardly start any posts at all introducing a topic or prompting discussion about something... If you don't want to do it then hire some content writers from somewhere and let's have some thought provoking material.

One thing thats left talkfreelance for dust in the last few years is that other sites of it's type, have now developed their sites to be more than just a forum. I think we need to think outside the box for interesting and new ideas maybe such as project sites by talkfreelance members or podcasts or something that will make other freelancers want to listen and pay attention to the forums, also the design that we have isn't exactly mind blowing. The point I'm trying to make is that the admin of talkfreelance need to put some money into all this and back users wanting to start something up.

Ideas?