Around May 2007, when I finally accepted that Mike wasn't really going to do much with/for his site, I shifted my focus away from OF and re-established the OF Blog as a means of furthering certain interests that I felt weren't being addressed well at the site. It is interesting to note that there were at least three others who did post at OF/wotmania from 2005-2008 who went on to establish some very important SF/F (OK, one mostly joined to pimp his blog, but still, it took visibility here at least as much at Westeros back around 2005-2007 to gain influence) blogs. Yes, today Westeros' Literature section is slightly more active than OF was post-2005, but it never really focused on creating content (discussing it, however, was much better than at OF in its latter days, alas).

Certainly didn't help that almost all of those who did try to provide content for their various sections did not become leaders here, although our reasons for that differ, as you already know.

Two other things addressed either in this thread or not mentioned at all:

1) The layout/format is very unfriendly for those who use social media or other forum layouts. Might as well use Usenet, I suppose.

2) The notion that combined boards would improve matters is strange, considering it wasn't until the Other Fantasy subtopic was removed from the general board in October 2001 that there really was much discussion of anything. Too often, such threads were lost in the "Off Topic" posts of the day, something that I suspect would happen here (after all, when I joined wotmania in October 2000, there wasn't all that much activity as well).

Just don't think there is a panacea here for this site's terminal woes. As B.B. King sang, the thrill is gone.