[Comrade Bassam]

Great initiative indeed!

Many members will take care of the technical little stuff that relate to the daily management and member privileges...

I will speak of personal experience, especially being among the first members of the forum and having served, for a very long time, as staff member in practically all the various tasks available (political, community, moderation, board of trustees....etc).

The issue evoked over here has been, at several periods of time, the primary nightmare so I was focusing all my effort on the positive and negative factors of influence over that matter so here are my results:

1) The forum killer, par excellence, was specialization and division (of topics and of staff)! When the forum was concentrated in no more than two or three sections (political and non-political and news&articles), growth was exponential. Psychologically speaking, members who visit forums are, in general, global information seekers. In other terms, they are the ones who are to be targeted mainly. Also in other terms, they'd like to see the most interesting issues being brought up from different fields on their screen without having to go back and forth in different complicated pages. And in order not to lose the specialized minds, a certain form of labeling (either with logos or colors or I donno what) could be used to classify threads (not group them) within a minimum number of screens (1 would be perfect).

2) The second forum killer was the orange theme. That was a desastrous choice. My close monitoring of members and topics dynamics at the time of theme change showed me clearly the way things changed in matter of members quality and in matter of topics quality. Both became, to any mind that refuses to be insulted in his intelligence... sorry for the word... DISGUSTING. Instead of being a place for true dialogue for all of us to be able to better make up our minds on different issues, it became a place of exposure of "nawar w tatar w 7awach el tayyar" (sorry for the word but you have to accept it if you really are looking for change and reform).
You cannot imagine the amount of repulsion to smart minds (even including the forum administration itself!) that this shift in forum philosophy (and don't believe it's just a matter of look!) created...

3) The forum has excellent potentials behind screens. I know that perfectly and I can list more than 100 super-minds just now without having to do big memory effort. What's good is that at least this potential is mostly preserved (we lost a good part of it and I'll list how in the coming points). So what we need is to be able to drive that potential from "behind screens" to "on keyboards"!
For that to happen, don't waste your time thinking of technical stuff!
The only channel is through human networking!
Forum staff, as well as forum lovers in general (and those are usually by far more effective than the whole staff, so those have to be preserved at any price!), should be like "mkhetir" on this board. They have to know how to build a huge network of relations with members. When these come here, they'll come for you and not for the colored electrons. This human networking allows the creation of a forum "elite". As you can notice, since quite some time, this category remained steady and even decreased. Elite renewal is a must or else the forum will grow old with its elite.
And in order to attract such people, you have to lead the example. For instance, many among this class of members made what the forum is due to their admiration to the effort exposed by X. Take this example and try to think about it in deep...
Moreover, the forum staff should be like "moukhabarat" and know everything about every active member. This is not too hard with some effort and research and that should be a team as well as an individual kind of work.

4) The forum is not mainly a news source. News and information constitute support to the arguments of discussion indeed, but they're not what the forum is made for. Discussions and generation of ideas is what the forum is made for!
When the forum turned, with time and with specialization, a source of news, it got itself sinking in an ocean of competition, especially in the last couple of years with the news media revolution that occurred after the assassination of PM Hariri.
In order to get dragged to think, generate and post ideas, that potential behind screens needs to feel they're not just adding stupid news or adding great ideas that nobody will get to see because the clientelle is as stupid as the kind of news it comes to seek!
When the forum becomes a field of confrontation of ideas, trust me you will see a lot of great names coming back and the birth of new great ones as well!

5) Back to human networking... I'll tackle the issue of rules. Some moderators were unconsciously (even me included), in many periods and with many really good people, a pain in the a*s*s and pushed a lot of great minds away. Sometimes, we have to advance human intelligence over systematic work and that requires a lot of effort and a big spirit to attract critique in order to be able to improve and sense members feelings and attitudes towards staff behavior.

6) Professional and objective input is very important in the different threads being discussed. In times of absence of mass devotion, the staff has to interefere and provide that in order to maintain the forum alive, at least until a new wave of public devotion gets born. That was the idea behind my proposal once for the foundation of the research forum. Unfortunately, the idea was hijacked and turned away of its original purpose and that is what drove me to withdraw from the project.
The idea was to have a SECRET team of members that are close to the staff. Those would have a task to check on every thread and monitor the discussions. Wherever a good issue is brought up, a member of that team would go and do some research work on the matter and post the information he or she found in order to assist and improve the level of discussion (as that information could be thus used as support in argumentation). A SECRET section would be dedicated for that team in order to be able to easily coordinate their work and expose their outcomes. Unfortunately, the research forum that is there today is not anywhere close to the original idea.

7) The forum gained its momentum from exclusivity. When the latter decreased, the forum momentum and work decreased as well... dramatically!
That exclusivity comes from the fact that the forum, due to the love it attracted, became a 24/24 team of more than 10,000 active national and international ground reporters.
Whenever everyone of us saw an ant moving around, we felt the rush and couldn't wait to find any internet connection (and sometimes it was too hard to find back then) to share the info with the fellow members.
Now why very few still feel that and not all the members? I will not answer that question but leave it for the staff to think of it alone...
When the forum gets back to its identity as "Generator of ideas" instead of a "News recycle bin", it will be back to fit our aspirations for it.
For example, the documents that CedarLb used to spend hours to work and post online to share with members, were just tremendous. Why this is not happening anymore? Also I will share my answer but will leave it for the staff to think of it and try to find their own answers like I found mine...