What are we gonna do about the Monastery?

[Sarmatian]

A problem is just a lack of posters in general. Were only getting about ~250 members visiting a day, and even fewer of those people visiting are posting.

Backroom still has decent activity and most of the people in the backroom were, more or less, contributors to the monastery. Some of them can be motivated to post again, but they need something to motivate them. New members likewise.

That's what I meant by not wanting to spam a forum if no one is really reading it.

A forum is for discussion, not for quizzes, articles and competitions - for the latter three you don't need a forum. If you want historical debate you have to post something to grab people's interest and draw in more posters. If the place is too fussy and it's regulars too pedantic it will drive potential contributors away.

tl;dr - go forth and post...

Actually, forum is just the place for that in my opinion, but what the heck. Purpose of all that is to inspire debates and discussion. What forum isn't for is what druzhina is doing - posting a gazzilion of random links that don't inspire any discussion and are actually scaring new members off - as you can see by AntiDamascus' reaction.

I didn't mean turn the Monastery into a place solely for quizzes, but why not organizes some debates?

Post an announcement on the entire forum that we're gonna organize debates in the Monastery and that members can propose a topic. We choose a few most interesting topics, let people apply for either side, organize a panel of judges and have a whirl. The winner gets a badge or something.

With "go forth and post" you're basically saying "I don't care". No one can change that on their own, it needs a concentrated effort from more than one member. If someone has a better idea, I'm all ears, that's why I asked here, but if we don't do something, the Monastery's gonna remain empty. We may fail if do something, but at least we tried.