What was once the bulk of traffic on these forums in 2008 (and prior) through until 2013 has indeed shuffled off to Facebook and Tapatalk. A segment also gets funnelled into Reddit. As you're aware a handful of us are pretty active on SRK. You and I for example feed screeds of stuff into that site daily.
I built a cross-posting feature (i.e. single account required) between SMF and Wordpress to facilitate article linking and comment posting as a means to help the front-page pull in some attention over the (at the time) high traffic the forums generated. I think my timing sucked there, as it is rarely used. The same somewhat applies to the little stream index above too (though you can't so much comment against it - its just a dynamic list, that populates whenever the collection of streams it keeps tabs on go live).
The event registration/interest calendar bolt-on for event announcement posts also worked well when myself and Goswu were running YSB, and from what I can tell it still does today albeit with a reduction in discussion. It is now more of a 'yep, I'm coming' thing, and that's about the size of it.
Participation on forums his historically been the life-blood of ozhadou.net, especially in the past. It has also typically come in waves, with the release of news games being the catalyst to bring in both new users and discussion. The release of Sirlin's HD Remix for ST pulled in a lot of users around 2007/8 (and with them a lot of discussion) and later the release of SFIV for arcade and then consoles. This held sway with the releases of Super SFIV and 2012, KOF, Marvel and to perhaps SFxT. Things began to wane (i.e. shifted to social media) perhaps 6 months before Ultra dropped which brings us to where we are today.
These aspects aside, the forums (and to an extent front-page) sees predictable surges when major events crop up (OHN, Shadowloo, BAM, et al) but in recent years these have also petered off with discussion again being largely attached to social media.
I personally don't use social media, though acknowledge that the vast amount of people do and have considered reworking ozhadou.net (front-page and forums) to better integrate with FaceBook in particular so far as cross-posting and single sign-on is concerned. This means that irrespective of where people 'post', both the FaceBook and ozhadou.net resources would be populated with banter.
Perhaps the main reason I haven't done this is because I have a reluctance to attach personally identifiable aspects to posts - for example, Joe User's FaceBook account/username being linked to posts and comments here. However, the trend I see is that people don't seem to care about this so perhaps it is worth revisiting. Feedback on this is definitely welcomed as I certainly don't want to be forcing user's hands when it comes to that kind of thing.
One thing I am interested in is where people from Australia's FGC are active on FaceBook - if there are go-to FaceBook groups or pages that people gravitate towards, I can look at some methods to cross-pollinate things if they are indeed active. This would work two fold where both resources would generate attention while keeping what is shared/posted in sync.
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More information about who won the tourney's, breakdown the brackets , a big match video section, I think a lot of people like watching, make this place THE hub of fighting games in Australia.
I'll see what I can do in terms of dynamically pulling in Challonge bracket output. This would mean less manual data entry - if the results are recorded (say for example, OHN, YSB, TTT, etc) I might be able to pull them into a go-to location that populates as results come in. I am unsure if Challonge has an external API, but I can certainly take a look.
We had a video section in the past but it sorta fell by the way side. We can always fire it up again.
Tips section? Where people can share technology.
A single forum dedicated to this where users tag threads accordingly posts (e.g. [SFIV] - Beating Crouch Tech) might be useful. Once somebody kicks something like this off, it tends to attract attention as each person adds in their methods and so on. Again, this is the kind of thing that tends to gain traction when a new game drops (i.e. SF5) but might benefit from the cross-pollination thing from FaceBook mentioned above too.
Maybe a shake up on the visual style.
I'm a text person personally, though I do admit things could use a fresh coat of paint. Goswu has been our main man so far as the visual style is concerned so perhaps we can look at giving the place an updated look. The separation of the front-page (Wordpress) and the forums (SMF) can make this tricky in terms of establishing consistency, and the forums may see a change again if social media integration with SMF isn't as clean as I'd like (I prefer to minimise hack and slash methods where possible, as it can break update functionality with the underpinning applications).
Do you guy's need help doing this stuff?
Always welcome. Perhaps the most welcomed commitment would be for content contributors. When content is created (interviews, articles, featured video submission, etc) it tends to invoke discussion which keeps the wheels turning. If people are interested in contributing in this area by all means sing out.
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Above all I think social media integration is key. Forums as a whole are somewhat dying all over (not just ozhadou.net), with those surviving either being quite large (SRK for example) or bolstered with social media integration as a content life-line. This is
probably the immediate area to look at and we'd welcome any suggestions people have - particularly in the form of existing examples. One thing I have considered is bolting on Disquss support, which wrangles FaceBook, Twitter, OpenID (and so on authentication) post submission though this is again a separate component from the (existing) forum.
Hit me with some FaceBook groups so I can look into some options - I think that might be a good starting point.
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