As we discussed a couple of days ago in chat, I've noticed many times when a lot of different conversations go on in almost a daily basis in chat when there's nothing going on in the forum and the problem with that is visitors who aren't registered can't see those conversations in chat..
Now a lot of times these conversations are in no way related to Alizée. That doesn't matter. We have young members who come along who are in school and I think they might be very interested in conversations about school or playstations or about the weather or for visitors who work, conversations about jobs.
I feel we need to make this forum a more interesting place to attract new members. Two members have been carrying the financial load for a long time. Lefty will always be a fan of hers I'm sure, but it seems he has moved on from the forum. Even if he still makes an occasional post, it's not fair to him keep carrying the financial load.
Now I'm not looking for any donations at this point, but I would like to make changes here that would make the 'open' forum a little more interesting to visitors. I'd like to have a chat that is available to all. Of course we still need a private chat for obvious reasons.
Many members aren't in a good position to donate. It is my hope that we can bring in more members. The more people we bring in, the more likely more members will come along who can contribute.
I'd like to see some changes made to the forum. Maybe the only way we can make the changes I feel many of us feel need to be made is to buy the server from Ben. I am willing to do that if Ben is willing to sell it.
One thing I'd like to do on our home page is to have a different picture every week. There are so many beautiful pictures of her from many different years, that it's a shame to have the same one up for months.
I think the bio takes up too much room. I'd like to have something that starts the first few lines of a bio, but then have what a lot of web pages have where it will say "more' at the bottom and clicking on that will take you to a page that gives you a full bio.
I'd like to have other pictures from different parts of her career, such as some of her most memorable performances such as Moi Lolita in Amsterdam, J'en ai marre pour Laurette, ACC. Other pictures of En Concert and the two Stars A Domicile shows, SAGA, DALS, Les Enfoires and there are several other shows she was in, so there would be something by those pictures, probably "more' again where it would take you to a page with a story about that event along with links to Youtube videos about these events.
Again to make these kind of changes, I think we'd have to buy the server. If that happens, Lefty is making his payments to Ben, so I think we'd lose his $25 a month then. Somehow, I think we'll find a way to make that up.
For the short term, I'd like to create a thread in the open forum where people could chat and this thread would have a lot more leeway than threads used to have. In the past, we needed members to stick to the topic. The main reason being if in the future, you wanted to looks something up, if what you're looking up wasn't related to the thread, it would be very difficult to find.
But time are changing. There are times when I want to post something, I'm not sure which thread to put it in and today I think we need to make it easier to post. Plus I've seen some interesting conversations in a thread broken up because they went off topic. Sure I want us to still post in a related thread if possible, but if somebody posts in the 'open chat' thread.....so be it.
So like I said, I'm not looking for donations now. I'm just looking for members to do their share to make this forum a more interesting place for visitors to draw in new members. The more members we have, the more likely we are to get members who are in a good position to donate and the more members we get who are willing to donate, the more we can do with this forum.
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