After 14 years WOKJ is a rickety boat in serious danger of demise due to

- Attrition of members: People leave all the time and nobody has replaced them in years. The post per day count is like... less than 50? There's a breaking point if it gets low enough where people log on and no new posts are there since a few hours ago. Then they stop coming, and it's over.

- Financial/server situation: WOKJ is unreasonably expensive for its current traffic because of needing to host 2 million old posts. This gets worse when considering Magnus was the biggest financial benefactor I believe, putting pressure on Dr. Lecter to keep paying for some reason despite the forum being nothing but thorn in his side to him at this point. On the old server the loss is hundreds a year, not sure what it would be now. Without being able to afford the server it had with Magnus, it already has run into problems as seen by the expired Chinese pages

I present 3 options

Stay the course

The financial and servers situation can be patched up, possibly by deleting posts to make it lighter (does that work?) or having a donation system, leaving attrition of members as the main problem. Rebooting the mainsite could be an effort to get new members, but even if unsuccessful if the problem is only members, this place would have at least a few more years left in its comfortable home. Whereas starting a new forum could flop and lead to the end much quicker, or could just be a worse experience than it is here enough to not be worth it.

Start a new forum

A new forum could be started for free giving it long term sustainability so long as the members post there, and would let Dr Lecter move on with his life. It could also have a new name with Movies or Box Office in the title which could lead to more success marketing to new members in places like twitter. Getting people to view the WOKJ twitter account has not been a problem, it's going from there to them signing up for WOKJ that's the biggest hurdle, the weird name could be hurting it

Migrate to BOT

WOKJ posters agree to head to the forum most similar to it and that has the traffic in Box Office Theory. This would complete the circle as the original WOKJ posters started on BOM, which BOT is now the modern equivalent of. I consider BOT in its current state to have a lot of bland posts, but it is a different forum with WOKJ posters on it and could bring out discussions with more personality and intelligence. If the original WOKJ community happened on BOM it can happen on BOT.

I think a new forum would be a death knell.

Agreed.

I'm definitely willing to donate to help server costs

Stay the course. I’ll donate monthly to help.

The methods and lack of communication to get members involved in supporting the forum financially have been poor, to say the least. Many of us have been here for 10-15 years... I'm sure a number of us would be willing to chip in to keep it running.

And to those who are in the know, let me know if keeping private messages puts any strain on the server. I have 1,369 messages stored in my folders from over the years that I can delete now if needed, along with a lot of drafts.

I don’t wanna migrate to BOT. A new site would be fine if everyone came along, but thats a big risk. If finances are really an issue we can make a patreon. But fixing the main site is obviously a better long term solution.

Maybe talk to the site administrators and owners first?

I am for crowdfunding if the site is having financial troubles.

How many posts need to be deleted to save on running costs? And will it even make an impact? The top ten posters hold 480,000 of the 2.1 million posts. Half of them no longer post, so if it will help with running costs their posts could be deleted. Mine can go too. Chippy's posts add nothing to the forum whatsoever, so they can all be removed. That's seven of the top ten gone. Just keep David's, Mike's, and Shack's, unless they are also willing to make a sacrifice for the good of the forum. As for the rest of the posters, do the same; if you are no longer active, your posts are deleted. Or if you are active but you opt for deleting your posts, you get a pat on the back and become a mod for a week.

Though beware; deleting posts will not only make the forum a mess, but it will also greatly impact any potential SEO that the forum draws from them. So I do not see post deletion as a viable option.

Migrating to BOT is an option, but honestly, I find it too crowded there. And they haven't moved beyond infancy in terms of users. Idk, it's cool in small doses as it has more activity.

1) I voted for "Stay the course".

2) Don't delete any posts. It will either turn numerous threads into an incoherent mess or, if you delete everything, this forum will not only be devoid of a large base of currently active users, but also of its content and history. Which is pretty much everything it has left at the moment.
To new users, it would look like one of the 10000s of newly started, unpopulated, empty forums that offer no reason to ever go back to. Its current backbone with thousands of registered members and millions of posts makes it look like an established platform, which is much easier to impress/attract people than one with 30 members and 200 posts.

3) Take any other measures needed to fix what's currently there, i.e. collect donations, fix any technical issues as far as it's possible with the current software, and fix/replace the main site, which hasn't been changed or updated in years.

If migrating to BOT means abandoning KJ, then RIP to KJ. What's the point of having this discussion if KJ closes shop?

And deleting past posts is not a good idea because they are a valuable record of KJ's history. And I agree with GuybrushX McMurphy. KJ's value lies in its content and membership.

You could probably delete the entire Rate The Album subforum and nobody would notice.

Yeah, lol. And Ratings and Rate a show. Never understood why there needs to be a dedicated area for ratings.

Rate the Album only has 868 posts which would save KJ about 20 cents, may as well leave post counts in tact at that point

You mean Nebs' post count.

What makes WOKJ special for me is the posts so deleting those is wack. You delete those then it's like why even come back. You might as well start at new place anyway.

Which brings me to the new website. Unless you can migrate all these old posts to a new name you can't do that because it comes back to those old posts but a new name that made sense would probably help.

I will only migrate to something else when/if WOKJ disappears.

I think the cost of running this site should be transparent and I do like the idea of a Patreon. I believe the costs would be covered easily using that service and then the economics will be out of the way and we can focus on making registration EASY and attracting new members.

I cant speak for Lecter, but at this stage there is no intention to abandon ship, delete posts or start a new forum.

As Guybrush stated, the forum history is actually one of its strengths.

Our first step will be to rectify the server issue. Then it will be about:

- ensuring the forum can be funded - partly by Lecter and myself but also via a donation system
- attracting new members

Open to ideas on how to best attract new members. I have a few myself which i'll present shortly.

Also open to discuss the site itself and whether we try and reboot it or give it up entirely. A simple site that re-introduces regular film/tv show reviews and a heavy focus on links to forum competitions (like MGKC's game, Shack's CRA, The Derby etc) may be a possibility.

Groucho's RT game yet again relegated to the "etc."

Would someone in the admin please fix the expired/suspended error? It's been going on for like three weeks.

Here's one suggestion to possibly increase site traffic. The name "World of KJ" does not give the slightest idea of what the site is about. Maybe change it to something like "WOKJ - Your Go-to Movie Forum". Whenever KJ came up in internet searches, people would know KJ is movies-related with that name.

One suggestion for the Twitter account (Shack) to increase traffic: engage more with other known movies people on Twitter; retweet, reply to, tag them.

Groucho's RT game is one of the most original game ideas. I have not seen something like it in other places.

Lecter can handle it.

I will look into it, but at this point the traffic has brought as many people to WOKJ as I realistically hoped for. We have about 600 profile views in the last month of the twitter WOKJ account which then exposes people to the link in the bio (which I can't track how many clicked on but had to have been some). I can track how many people click on WOKJ links when I put them directly in a tweet - BOR retweeted one last week that had lead to 8 link clicks to KJ on its own for example, but it led to zero registrations (the most recent sign-up is from lilmac's past forum), the gift card tweets had something like 20+ link clicks directly from them, and no outsider joined. lilmac has brought multiple Pathfinder forum people here but they register and then don't stick around. Overall people are coming to KJ but not wanting to post here. Obviously increasing traffic would make things better, but with a current rate of zero outsider posts in the last month, the current ratio of people visiting KJ vs signing up to be new posters is an uphill climb right now.

To an outsider what is WOKJ's identity? The name means nothing, the box office forum is much less active than other sites like BOT which is what box-office posters could be looking for. Should WOKJ's identity be rebranded to be film discussion? I don't know. Cinemania is not as strong a forum these days either without Dr Lecter

Simply put, what is the specific amount needed per month, what is the current short fall.

I am unsure as to what direction to go. I feel like many of the dates long timers, such as Magnus, Libs, Dark shape, Lecter, etc reached "move on" points in life that all of us will reach.

It will forever annoy me the Shawn and co. beat KJ to the punch of definitive box office analysis despite the amount of knowledge and talent this site once housed.

-Doesn't Lecter still check this site often, and just doesn't post?

-Theory is busy but OH MY GOD, the lunacy and stupidity of posters is crazy.

"This forum isn't beyond saving. There are good people here"

This is what we need to do.

1) Cherry pick the premier BOT posters and bring them here, have them bring other posters with them.
2) Reach out to old members and get them to return in some capacity. Perhaps we can pay them for slight presence on forums and more importantly, material for the main page.
3) Get some authentic, intelligent material on box office, present it well, promote it to those interested.

There is soooo much knowledge here, it's scary.

https://twitter.com/KJBoxOffice

Old twitter account btw, I like the look.