Seeing how less legitimate posters are posting, and seeing how it's a little hard to find good topics, it may do this site good to eliminate the "Serious Talk" sub-forums in the cultural section and to merge the topics in the "Seriouus Talk" sections into the regular sections. That way it makes it seem like there's more activity, and more topic choices.

Ben hasn't even made a Burmese section. What makes you think he's going to take this seriously?

I think this is a good idea. I rarely bother clicking on the serious talk forums anyway.

And so marks AF's slow regression into obscurity.

Well guys, it's been fun...

He was considering about getting rid of the "Serious Chat Forums", iirc.

http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/index.php?...&&st=80

Check out the May 20 2007 entry (the second one).

Asiafinest comes up at the top when I google search about asian history etc. This is hardly obscurity. Maybe the owner should promote the forum to college students?

I also found that a Google search on Asian Cinema, especially Indonesian, Chinese and Malaysian, is delivering several hits to Asia Finest.
I have been thinking about putting up posters for AF at some local universities.
The universities already have culture/film/sport clubs and chat groups looking for an online outlet..... so maybe AF can be the venue for some uni writers.



The "Serious Chat Forums" are hidden away from view and would gain more activity from being merged with the rest of the forum.
The title of a thread should in most cases let members know if the topic is "serious" or just casual chat.
As it stands, we have plenty of seriously well written and informative topics in the regular chat sections anyway.

Before we start doing that i think we should clean up the mess in the forum. It would be a huge embarrassment for us to invite new members with a forum filled with spams and intolerant fixed minded people.
I want AF to be more popular, it's a great site and have a great forum, great people (mostly) but BAD spams.

How sweet, but I think it's best to let this place die.

Dont remove the serious talks section.....

You see, the "Chat" section should be just for chit-chat....music, arts, current events, culture, those sorts of things.....it's for a "light" chit-chat type of interaction...meanwhile the "Serious talks" section should be for politics and anything else serious. It's not good to mix it.

The problem now is that people dont bother to categorize, they just open serious topics in the main national chat section....I guess it is easier, more convenient for them and also can get more views and hits. But I think this kind of mixing is bad and it interrupts with the atmosphere and makes both the chit-chat and serious talks topics to degenerate.

To solve the problem of people being lazy of clicking another time, the Serious Talks can be put in some visible sub-section just like the "Sticky" topics, so for example put the 3 latest threads as visible, or something similar.

But most importantly,

Please appoint new mods..!!

I enjoyed AF at first because there are indeed instances where I learn new things, but AF Forum has degenerated a lot due to excessive trolling and flame wars. Please Admin/ Ben, appoint new mods, and please do it immediately and promptly..!! ANY new mods is still better than now. Just do it already.

Let's work on getting rid of the trolls and spam.
Where are the new mods?

working on the spam problem first with the upgrade. I know it'll stop the PM spam and hopefully the forum spam. Trolls will come next when i finally add the new mods that has been long over due.

I agree.


I could understand and agree if there were more activity on this site and the Serious Talk sections were actually full of active topics, but what is actually happening is that good topics in the serious sections are being ignored because they are hidden from view, and less replies are being posted for those topics. In that way, it makes it a little pointless to even want to post topics in the Serious Chat sections because not a lot of people seem to go in. Until there is more activity, it would make sense for serious topics to be posted in the general sections so that this site can maximize its activity (or at least the appearance of activity).

I do agree that there should be some kind of marker, though, to indicate the nature of the topic -- maybe even making the most active topics sticky for a period of time.

I guess we could poll and continue to discuss any possible options for our forum.

Good to see there is not so much spam today.

One thing to note is that the last wave of spam was not just in AF, but it suddenly flooded many other online forums.
It seems that the use of sophisticated spam generation software has become widespread.

That's how I found this forum. I googled Taiwan.