Any Ideas to expand edeb8?

Since we seem to be going through another lull, I thought I might dust off this old thread.
In my opinion, this site has far too much potential not to be a premiere debating site.

I've been thinking a bit about why it seems to go through these lulls and I have some ideas. I'd be interested to hear what others think as well.

To address this issue I started with what I LIKE about this site, what does this site site give me BETTER than any other?

For me, that's a good clean debate on interesting topics in a customisable range of styles.

And that's pretty much it. The forums are good and should stay, but I do wonder if they sometimes distract from the primary purpose of a site like this?
As you would expect, almost everyone active on this site is pretty opinionated, and has no problem sharing their opinion in a shoutbox or a forum thread, myself included.
So why doesn't that translate to the actual debating more often than it does?

I think that if this site wants to grow, it needs to offer a point of difference. I don't think forums are going to be that point of difference.
I have a couple of ideas of what we might be able to do to promote and build that point of difference but I'd be interested to hear from others on their perspectives first...

nzlockie: First of all, you're right about the point of difference. What edeb8 does better than any other site is provide customization options for debates. Pretty much every bug I'm fixing or new feature I'm adding concerns something that literally does not exist anywhere else.

I also agree that forums are generally a cool diversion for any community. Sometimes they might distract a little from the primary purpose, but I see it a little bit like how most RL debate clubs will round out the evening with a trip to the pub. Not really strictly debating, but still a neat way to end the night. It's also where you get to know others in the club, rather than just argue against them on assigned topics all the time.

The problem with selling edeb8's value to people, I've found, is that it doesn't seem particularly accessible compared to other sites. Maybe my design is a part of that, and maybe having a lot of options and different things to do confuses new users a bit. As anyone who's seen our statistics page can tell, the vast majority of our users have never even participated in a debate. We get a good number of sign-ups for our visitor numbers, but once they've joined it would be good to get them debating.

Put this in perspective. Edeb8 has 169 users and 82 debates, or about 2 users for every debate. Createdebate has 63768 users and 45471 debates, or 1.4 users per debate, which makes sense because they have a very low-engagement platform (they even call themselves a "debate forum", and if we measured forum threads as debates like they do we'd have better numbers than them). DDO, somewhat more comparable, has 168188 users and only 41326 debates, or about 4 users for every debate. So Edeb8's users are twice as engaged with debating as them, we just don't have the traffic they do (and we get better sign-up rates too).

But still, we could definitely do better.

admin: Yeah I hear you. The problem, as we both know, is that those numbers need to be looked at in context. There's a big difference between a site of over 168,000 having a 4-1 ratio and a site of less than 200 having a 2-1 ratio. There's also the time they've been up and running to consider as well.

I fully agree that the forums are both fun and necessary. Many of our debates are born from the forums. That being said, I think the way to grow the site HAS to be the debates, rather than adding an economics forum or starting a Mafia game or whatever it is they do at DDO.

I'm interested to hear your comment that people find the interface complicated. I'm struggling to see why, but I'm guessing you're already working on it!
Maybe I'll go sign up to DDO and see what their one looks like.