Behold a lovely forum for discussing puzzle hunts, puzzle magazines, and stranger things. It's new, so there's not much there yet.
Scott Blomquist set it up and seeks your frankest feedback. He writes:
Hey, all, I’ve been meaning to start down the road toward building up a community of all you puzzle people out there, whether you call your puzzle addiction Puzzle Hunt, Mystery Hunt, Treasure Hunt, Games Magazine, or The Game, I’ve set up exactly the site for you: http://www.puzzlehunters.com.
Please check it out and give me the frankest feedback you can on what’s missing. I also admit that I’m not 100% sure how to quickly get to critical mass, and, once I’m there, how to sustain it. Your thoughts on that also appreciated.
Some thoughts... I'm guessing that forum activity will be bursty. Like, in the events areas, lots of excitement when a game is announced, a flurry of "Yay, thank you" posts after a game... but not much else. Games Magazine, P&A don't come out super-often, so... bursty again. I bet folks won't get into the habit of swinging by the site once per day. So it's good to get notified when there's activity. The site supports notification, but it seems like I have to sign up for notification in each forum separately. That's a minor hassle, but it's a hassle. So... in terms of getting people to check back when there's new activity I'd suggest:
- Don't go wild adding new forums. While there's still small numbers of people using the site, probably no single forum will get much traffic.
- Does this phpBB support RSS feeds announcing forum activity? There's a non-trivial chance I will overlook email notifications.
To grow the community quickly, you might encourage an event organizer to use a forum as part of a pre-game puzzle. If each team needs to post their answer, that's a few people subscribed right there... A lot of folks who run games think about community, so they might go for it. To keep people coming back, trick your friends into posting content occasionally. Maybe occasionally post some philosophical questions, try to stir up a lively discussion. "Hidden Pre-Game puzzles: Wacky fun times or unhelpful annoyance?"
Labels: puzzle scene, puzzlehunts
I absolutely love the idea of a message board myself and want to see it grow. I fear, however, that people see each other too often in person and use their blogs as their commentary, taking away at least part of the reason for visiting a forum.
Not that it'll stop me :)