[noname219]

You've said something important Synthlight in the very first point you've made in this thread that needs a bit more attention I believe :

1) The site grew immensely from somewhere around 2005 until 2008. It grew so much that when the commercial aspect went away, everyone was left with a tremendous amount of custom code and a very large site in general. This meant that any sort of management required a large team. As we know, large volunteer teams are notoriously difficult to organize.

I think this is one of the reasons why there hasn't been much improvement over the years. Trying to implement new features or enhancements (such as the FFR Global Leaderboards) has been made so complex because of all the small details that need to be taken into account. Huge parts of the code should be rewritten entirely, and it has been mentioned in a thread soon after the scores purge when Fission was willing to help out but it didn't work out.

Originally Posted by Synthlight

Would you guys disagree? I don't mean to sound so harsh but what kind of effort has gone into making new visitors or players comfortable? Are there specific examples? If I come to this site new to the game, new to the community. Why would I stay? If everyone that volunteers spent their time welcoming new visitors or drawing them to the site, it would be way more beneficial than everything else going on.

I can give you a few examples I know for making the site more attractive to new users, missing some :
- Reviving the Facebook page
- Rewriting parts of the website and making it more mobile friendly
- There has been discussions to move to HTML5 (not even speaking of the many talks to develop an app for Android or iOS)

Sure enough, we need new users and make promotion for the website as much as we can, but it goes hand in hand with development if we want to retain users.