Thread:Silver-Haired Seireitou/@comment-18812574-20180425170008/@comment-18812574-20180427121722

The other issue is that wiki activity all across fandom has declined in general, at least for small-time operations like this one. Community Central has shifted their focus towards centralizing everything for their FANDOM project, which means they put the "stamp of approval" on wikis such as Wookipedia and Marvel sites while fanon wikis, such as NF and here, get tossed to the wayside. One example of this has been the video intros they've been auto-adding to canon wiki's popular pages in order to "cut down on advertisement," which is something Avatar wiki is currently battling with. I'm actually not sure how they can do all this under copyright, since all fanon wikis are just that... fan wikis. You're not technically supposed to make money from it and such but... whatever.

All that said, I kind of think the top-down changes have driven a lot of users away from wiki and towards other formats of RPing. I know I found a Bleach forum site to RP during BFF's dry seasons, but now that place is almost as low in activity as here. Another thing too is that all the fanon attention has shifted to other series: the new anime fans (age 13 and up) are into series like Tokyo Ghoul and Attack on Titan, so there aren't a lot of newcomers to Bleach. Boruto at least attracts new fans for Naruto, even though Boruto is... well... I don't consider it part of "Naruto" but anyway.

Perhaps we could try reaching out to canon Bleach wiki again? I don't know how friendly they've been in the past. It's difficult because if we advertise BFF on Bleach canon, then it seems to marginalize BF, and vice versa, and I'm not sure how keen they'd be for putting both fanon sites on the canon page.

Another very radical idea would be (and don't shoot me for this, please) would be to, if it's possible, perhaps re-combine the two wikis again? If we got a fanon-canon project started again, that would maybe be a draw to join the communities/unite them around a common goal and double our collective activity. I think there's actually an easy way to combine two wikis into one site on community central, but I could be wrong there. But I mean, the rend that happened years ago was years ago now, and I'm not even sure if the original parties involved are still even around. Furthermore, if the RPCQE is a non-thing anymore (ok, *perma-suspension), then there's really no difference between the two site's content. Two together would always be stronger then one, and that way we could put all of our attention into promoting THE ONE Bleach Fanon Wiki as opposed to trying to advertise two sites that are both suffering for lack of activity.

Ultimately, however, I think the biggest thing to re-start activity is to actually re-start RPs. If there is no community interaction going on then we're just compiling character articles here. But as far as strategies for HOW to get RPs started again, I'm at a loss. Kenji's idea with focusing on the novels was I think, a great suggestion. We can pull on all of canon material, including the canon material that Bleach canon wiki ignores, and focus on that as a draw perhaps.

Regardless, I think one of the main issues with the last rendition of the FC was it pushed the envelope on canon elements (not like the Quincy arc didn't do that but... hem). Perhaps if we shifted our attention to the novels, which are the "current" canon source material, which could swing more momentum into a unified project.

But these are just my rambling thoughts.