You may want to change the board format to full on anime, instead of Just Tenchi. Tenchi's been over for a while (damn the bastards and their wussyfied he marries everyone ending! He's supposed to pick Ryoko damn it!) so maybe you should change the name to an anime forum and encompass more series to bring in more people.

The idea has been floated a few times in the past, but in the end it was decided to stay with Tenchi Muyo. Somehow Neelick seems to have disappeared into an alternate dimension so I'm not sure how far the idea would go this time around either. ^_^;;

Hi Hi! Sorry for the unanswered questions. I've just been lazy.

I'm basically open to suggestions from the users of the site. I typically take the majority's opinions and go from there. If there is significant interest in making such a change I'd be interested in options.

My only question is will changing the form into a normal anime board really get more people to join?

I'm a member of another Tenchi forum that does pretty well for itself. So I don't think that it's Tenchi itself that's the cause of this board being inactive.

I think that there's another reason why people don't post here.

I think I made this same suggestion 7 or 8 years ago.

~ZL

Well when the board first started, Tenchi was not new. The OAV was already around and the first movie existed. Also the Pretty Sammy OAVs were around. The Tenchi Universe was just being dubbed and I bought the VHS cassettes as they were released.

Then when it started to air on Cartoon Network, it really took off. There were a lot of people who were discovering it for the first time who had a lot of questions.

New Tenchi content is being released still and there are new anime fans discovering it as time goes on.

Lately there's way more anime to choose from and new stuff coming out all the time of various levels of quality. And of course there is a certain advantage of focusing on a niche of anime. Trying to cover all the bases can be a daunting task.

A while back the Anime Spotlight was introduced. The intention was to stay at the cutting edge of new and good anime being released. Perhaps that is something that could be re-explored? There are a lot of members who are on the cutting edge of the newest anime coming over from Japan. Because let's face it. There's a lot of good anime coming over from Japan. To have a resource to save you a lot of time of watchign crap anime could be a great feature.

I know when we had started the Anime Spotlight, and I saw an anime at a convention or something that was on the Spotlight, I was far more likely to take a look at it.

I'd need somebody who's very aware of what's coming out and have a lot of expertise to pull it off though.

Well, while Tenchi is in decline and stagnating (and imo rather spent - you can go only so many years without new material), I don't see many of the anime boards are doing much better. Many of the bigger ones (google "anime forum" and see the top results) that have dozens+ of different series like AMG/Tenchi/etc are also kinda stagnant for their size. So you can have either a generic anime board that hundreds of boards are already doing and get a fully generic Tenchi conversation going every so often, or focus on one of the hotter animes right now, which you may or may not be a fan of.

I see forums dying in general. Even big ones. People moving over to things like Reddit and other social media. Facebook too, though that is really shallow conversation imo.

I went over to Harry Potter myself, fanfic reading, at least. With about 550,000 fics at ffnet (vs Tenchi's 3,000, El-Hazards 67, Ah My Goddess' 589, Angel Sanctuary's 1,000, Koi Kaze's 0 -- just picking animes I like) it'll be a long time before it's gone.

Whatever you do, cut down on the number of subforums. There were always too many subforums on this board. Not as bad as the old one, but still bad. Never got the point of making stagnant subforums when it could be stuck as topic in General anyway. 4 to start with should be plenty.

*sigh*