Have you thought about creating a subruddit for the forum?

[Vasily_1942Red Star Supporter]

February 7th, 2012

Running a subruddit for the forum would be a good way of driving in traffic and getting new people to the site.

[Vanya]

February 7th, 2012

We'll see what Tanya says but she will probably say no. She has already said multiple times that she doesn't want to do a lot of platforming and promotion on other websites.

[Vasily_1942Red Star Supporter]

February 7th, 2012

Why not? It's an important part of getting the site to grow. It would be good to grow a platform on other sites.

[Tanya]

February 8th, 2012

Vanya already answered the main point of the question. We already have a fairly established forum going that can sustain itself through organic promotion.

I don't want to force promotion and we should desire quality over quantity from users. We already have a large population of active users that keeps the forum active with new discussions and trying to drive traffic would only create a boost to one's perceived self importance.

Flooding the site with a lot of new users taken from major platforms would drastically increase the demands on the moderators who work for free because they have a passion for the community and they'd probably be low quality users generally.

I'd rather have a quality resource run by people who are passionate then commercialize the site. Right now most of our income goes straight to server costs. Right now we have 31 Red Star members. We'd need 800 just to get to the minimum of what I'd need to consider making this a full time job, and that's if I'd be living with my boyfriend.

I did go and create a few subruddits, but that's mostly so we can get the name. We could use it as a place to post updates off-site which could be useful for times when the site is down.

[Vasily_1942Red Star Supporter]

February 8th, 2012

It's good that you have the subruddits to reserve the name. I understand your point about not wanting to over promote the site elsewhere online but doing something to draw in new people would be beneficial just to get new people since users will come and go and not everyone is going to be a perpetual user for as long as the site exists.

Having a wider audience for educational content would also be nice.

Overall I think you have the right idea not to overly commercialize the site and instead rely on organic growth.

Having a support subruddit could be beneficial as a place where non forum members can ask questions or give advice about the site.

[Tanya]

February 9th, 2012

We dealt with this exact issue over the summer and throughout last year. We had a user who was with us for more than a year get permanently banned after he had a meltdown because I consistently didn't want to go along with his suggestions for promoting the site.

I've made various Youtube videos in the past and I think that releasing the occasional production with a lot of work and research put into it could be a good concept for education outside of this site, I don't want to deal with the dynamics of having a major "presence" on Youtube. I'd rather keep the forum as a relatively niche "underground" resource for reenactors and history buffs. Once you start getting into mainstream pop culture you're going to have tons of Nazi fetishists constantly complain that we aren't repeating 1 Tiger = 5 Shermans nonsense. On the other side we've had literal fetishistic crossdressers and Soviet fetishists whose entire reason for being here was to facilitate sexual larping and uniform fetishism. We occasionally have dudes post jokes about having their girlfriends wear their uniforms which is fine, but constantly asking for advice and then disregarding when you get called out on farb because you want a role play costume is just insulting. Plus blatant creepy fetishism is going to drive women away from the hobby.