Ideas to Revamp Animeb

[Aniki]

As per Balmung's request, 'tis here where we shall let loose our ideas on how Animeb should go about conquering the interwebs.

These are my own thoughts on the matter:

1. We are well past our prime. Animeb was one of very few go-to places for fans of Ken Akamatsu's works. Love Hina and Negima were big hits in their own ways and interest was definitely there, but now, that interest is gone and we've lost many of our friends to that cruel mistress known as life.

2. My personal opinion is that we need to market ourselves to a wider audience. First off, we need to be open to the newer anime. We have to face facts: hardly anyone wants to discuss the anime we watched when we were younger. In fact, most of those people no longer have the time or no longer care about visiting forums. Our only option is to bring in fresh blood, and by that I mean we need to attract the new kids watching the new anime.

3. Now I'd like to mention what we should do about the site itself. I mentioned it before, but a lot of the bigger anime websites offer downloads in one way or another. It's almost pathetically easy to find these websites by googling "[generic anime name] download episode 1." Thus, I believe it's at least worth considering if maybe we'd like to offer downloads ourselves [via direct downloads from mega or other website, or maybe even torrents]. This would serve as a main attraction to hook the snot-nosed brats into joining our forums to discuss their favorite couple pairings in [generic anime].

4. The current forum and its future: I love this place, I have plenty of memories here, some good, some bad, some downright embarrassing when I look back. The forums are chock-full of all our past discussions, memories and drama. So I put forth the question of whether we want to keep all of this out in the open. Do we perform some clean-up to make the place look nice? Do we archive all our old posts and start fresh? Maybe something in between? I think that at the very least some clean up is in order. We want to give the impression that we're young and vibrant, not some old ghost town full of discussions that no one is ever going to touch again.

I'd like to hear any ideas of yours and of course comments on mine. I'm not foolish enough to believe that my ideas are all that great so feel free to rip me a new one if need be. My main thing is that I've gotten back into anime after being without it for a few years and I'd love to have a place to discuss the shows with others. I could easily go to some other forum but this place is too great to forsake. Who knows, maybe a little spit-shine could give this place some new life. If not, well, at least we tried.

[Balmung]

Thank you, Aniki.

1) Yes, we are well past our Prime and getting older with each day. It's how these things work. I honestly don't really even use forums except for those tied to products (Pathfinder/DnD/Games), or RP (Which have so many hundreds of hundreds of people in one central hub). But I do agree, the time for Love Hina and Negima is past, hence our amazing background thanks to Style.

2) This made me LoL. I go about discussing anime far older then I am, because I generally just love older anime. But you are correct. Most anime fans these days want to talk about Madoka, Kill La Kill, AoT and are very up-to-date on new things that come out. I've been watching a lot of anime recently, but I'm first and foremost a reader, so it is difficult sometimes for me to do this Young blood would be good as they generally watch the "Big Three" and whatever else they can get their hands on, the greedy sods.

3) Yeah you can find plenty of torrenting sites. Hell, I feel they were built around just that and then exploded into activity. Whether from comments on the torrents/reviews or just whatever. It takes a lot of work, but activity is pretty much guaranteed. But let me stress once again that it is a lot of work. Do you realize how much anime comes out in a week? @_@ I don't, and I'm still worried. Sure consider it, it needs to be considered, but also consider the work-load

4) I have always been very much Pro-Cleanliness. Having so much from the past just adds to the clutter and makes us look overall messy. It's especially bad when I scroll down and see forum posts from 2011 still popping up on the main page. I know that when I go about looking through a forum, the first thing I check is the dates on the main page and who made said posts. Is it all the same guy? Were the dates incredibly long ago? Does this place seem worth my time if it's going to close soon? Blegh. I would also like to concede that there are too many mind games when choosing a site these days

That said, discuss anime! Post it up, I'm sure we'll putter on and talk about it. Not like we won't try anyway. I especially like pulling back people like Pepe and Ryo, just to torture them into posting on Animeb. Hell, even ShinigamiDuo popped up a bit ago. Not all is lost, but I'd certainly like to know where these older members (whom have moved on) frequent in terms of sites, if any. For the most part it seems like they all just hang out on facebook these days @_@

[Balmung]

I haven't forgotten about this thread. Just waiting to see if anyone else wants to join in and throw in their two Latverian cents.

Side Note: I've also just recently read a large entirety of Manga, so I guess I need to start talking about them in one of the above forums...

[Drakeflyte]

I love this place, I have plenty of memories here, some good, some bad, some downright embarrassing when I look back. The forums are chock-full of all our past discussions, memories and drama. So I put forth the question of whether we want to keep all of this out in the open.

Well, getting rid of it *entirely* might make it hard for the folk like me with terrible memories to find out way back (through the 'nana peels)

And hi ^^

N.B. That's a terrible memory, not terrible memories of this place, it was fun here!

[BobCat]

I'm looking at this from a little different perspective. I'm not interested in this place being a anime-of-all-trades kind of site, those are a dime a dozen.

We started out with a niche. Love Hina. We were THE site for Love Hina fans. Period. So I and others recruited LH fans from all around the interwebs. Instead of having 10 fans here, 10 fans there, we put all LH fans here.

As a result, we stuck to the niche and this place rocked.

Of course, Love Hina will go down and another series would take its place as an awesome anime/manga. Negima was the next logical choice but we never made that transition, so that is too late.

Ken's latest work appears to be how popular? I don't know, I'm not into it. Despite the Shinobu character who is not a Maehara but looks like her.

If Ken's latest work is popular and there are fans, BRING THEM HERE and make AnimeB the niche place for it.
I bet there are forums everywhere, that have this new work as a discussion. Repeat what I and others did in the past. It is a winning formula.

Of course, don't stick to one series, do the same for other popular series that seem to have tons of fans spread out to even more forums.

Maybe that's one niche animeb can serve to rock again. Or maybe another anime/manga series that is popular can be it?

One thing about being a niche player is that you don't spread yourself too thin - don't bring 10 series because that risks watering this down to a general anime forum.

We could have been the LH / Negima and other Ken series forum.