Yes, that is definitely the lesson here! I was hoping we might see some organic growth but it looks like there’s a critical mass required for that to happen. We never reached the tipping point so were left with a site that was actually shrinking slightly as time went on. I set the site up because of two failed Area 51 proposals for an IF Stack Exchange site. I think I’ve learned that the criteria for sites graduating from Area 51 are in fact pretty reasonable.
I don’t think the size of the community is a problem, far more questions get asked and answered here. The issue is that most people are very content with this and other forums, and don’t see the lack of tagging, ability to mark duplicates etc as something which needs fixing. Which is okay, as long as people are happy, then we don’t need to try to change it.
Thanks for setting up and hosting the site Alex!
The suggestion is… that I do a bit more research before posting next time. Sorry about that!
Yes, thank you for the site Alex, and sorry it didn’t take off! For me a lot of it is inertia–rather than add another site check to my routine, it’s easier for me to spam “unread comments” here and, when someone’s asked a question I know has been answered, link them to the answers. The StackExchange template doesn’t seem to give as easy a means to track new activity, so it was harder to keep track of.
I think maybe another reason that StackExchangelike sites are better suited to a larger community is that in a community of this size it’s easier to keep track of all the questions that are asked without such a site.
In any case, thanks again for your efforts here.
The site is now closed, but a read-only static HTML archive can be browsed at docs.textadventures.co.uk/ifanswers.
The content is served from a GitHub repository at github.com/textadventures/ifans … e/gh-pages.
I’ve also uploaded a zip file of the archive to the IF Archive.
When I saw IF Answers the first time, I noticed that all the questions were Inform or Quest-related. I don’t use neither Inform nor Quest, so I thought that site was useless to me.
I don’t think StackExchange site would work for IF. You have a technical question? Go to your platform community. Even if the community is dead or very vile, it’s The platform community, the only place you guaranteed to get a meaningful answer. The communities are already small, it’s usually The Creator and his friends, and you can’t split up that. Even here, on a big IF forum, a question on Quest or TADS 2 or CircleMUD programming will be struggling for an answer.
So what question type remains if not technical one? The IF theory question. But my opinion is, nobody can organize a community strictly around IF theory.
I don’t get to spend much time working on my Inform game but I found the IFAnswers site to be very helpful. I used it several times and it was only because I tried it today that I’ve found it was closed so have signed up here. So to answer the OP, the infrequent use of the site coincided with my infrequent use of Inform.