Now that the problem with BFC's activity and lack of active members has been addressed in my
8YA blog I think it's time we as a community come together to do something about it.
Offline scenes, reddit, and instant chats may be dominating, but I believe we can revive SSBFC to be an active community despite being a forum. I believe we can make SSBFC great again! (sorry) DDM has suggested he has some site redesign plans in mind to highlight aspects of the website and well as integrate the
already fairly successful discord server we have onto the website. There is no time frame for when the changes will happen, but if we show an interest in wanting to help the site, I
bet he'll be more interested in doing it.
Like I said above, the Discord server has been doing pretty well among our core members, I think it'll end up being a great addition to increase chat activity among the website. But this still hasn't solved the problem of lack of active members and general lack of activity on the forums. This is one of those circular situations, where active members create activity, so in turn, we get more active members. Lack of activity drives away members, so the lack of activity continues.
I think one of the most important things everyone can do is to post. Even if you don't give a shit about a thread, if you have something that can possibly contribute, try to post. Your post make elicit a response from someone who had no interest in the thread before, and thus, create more activity. Post threads from time to time but don't go completely overboard with it. Post something you think people will want to talk about. That's probably the first step, and it sounds simple on the surface, but it's something that's going to be hard for everyone to do. Even with all the members that visit the website, we rarely have a lot of active posters. I'm sure there are plenty of you who will read this thread, then once again ignore it. If we can get inspired to liven up the forums a bit, it'll make new member integration much easier.
That being said, important aspects of maintaining a healthy wifi smash community is activity in that department. Obviously we need events that are successful. But we need active members that play smash in order to have successful events. But how can we draw people away from just playing for glory or Anther's Ladder? How can we incentivize more people to participate in tourneys? Especially if there aren't a lot of people. One consideration of this would be prizes/rewards. Building up a solid base of smashers is probably going to be the hardest part, we need more people for events to be more successful which will in turn draw more people. I'll go into prizes a bit a little further down.
Now, the one big thing that can be done to increase activity is luring people to the website. Getting active members that will stay will help drive activity and thus bring in more active members. To achieve this, we need to do some advertising. In my blog DDM himself said:
Lack of Advertisement
I agree with Enel's point on this. I used to promote the site a lot way back. Again though I have no time for this anymore. I used to post smash videos of me vs people on this site every week and they got 1000s of youtube views (sometimes 10s or 100s of 1000s) and brought in a TON of people. These days I don't have time to do this anymore but YOU ALL COULD. The option exists and is built right into the game now lol.
Posting videos is one option out of many that can be used to point members to the website. Like DDM said, this can be done through your game. Any epic replays you get can be uploaded. These videos can be posted everywhere, and links to the website can easily be in the description. Obviously higher quality videos can also exist and will probably work better, but this is easily an option.
Advertisement is extremely important. Doing this in any way possible will help. If you're playing someone in a set on Anther's and they seem polite enough, mention the site to them and the goals to make it a strong wifi community. If you're in for glory have the site as your tag. But maybe not even just that maybe have multiple tags like "join" "SSBFC.com" "for more 
" something like that you know? If you're at locals and know people who play on wifi for practice, tell them about the site, ESPECIALLY if you're well respected or well known player in your community. If you place well in locals and people look up to you, having you say something about the website could be HUGE. People like Fish and such could easily bring in members looking to get better. Even if you're not that well known, it can't hurt either. You can even use it as your tag in locals and if people ask about it you can easily tell them. I think these kind of things work better than general advertisement. Active advertising and aggressive advertising is what we're going to need. Another option could be trying to get the support of really popular players too. Could you imagine what it would do for the website if someone like zero or nairo tweeted it over twitter? Something like that can be huge and go a long way. But everyone can do their part here.
Another thing that could be done is old member outreach. If you still actively communicate with older members of the forums or know how to contact them, tell them about the revival we're trying to do and see if they play smash 4 and may be willing to come back. Having the presence of more veteran members may help the survivability of the website greatly too.
I wanted to go back to something I talked about earlier, the possibility of prizes for big events. A lot of people may not be willing to join tourneys or even use this website over other smash places if they're only looking for smash and not a community feel. I think having some sort of incentive for big events could help the website a ton, and I'm not talking about BFC bux which have pretty much become worthless these days. I think real prizes could add a lot of incentive and separate us from other places that may host tourneys or other wifi communities. Perhaps we could do community funded pots that are paid out to winners of tourneys or even have tourneys that are like offline events and have entrance fees and payouts to winners. This would of course require online payment methods and a trustworthy person handling the pot. And the latter may not help it take off a lot, but if people are willing to help kickstart the first few events, we can add incentive for both higher level players (rewards) and lower level players (experience) and may be the boost we need to give the website strong events and staying power. This is something that would need community support though.
DDM has poured a ton of time and effort into the website over the years. There are so many features that were really tough to implement that rarely see use anymore. I'm sure many of the older members have fond memories of this place and I would hate to see the website die. I believe in SSBFC and I believe in the community here.
Yeah, this isn't really an official committee, but I'd love if people could pledge support to this and be willing to help any way they can . If you have additional ideas please share them.
