This is an important topic that I'd like to get some discussion on. As you may know, the previous versions of this forum were hacked and the membership never returned. The site
https://classicaltheism.boardhost.com/ had over 700 members before it died, and this new forum only has like 50. There was also an issue about getting people to moderate the site and pay for hosting. So it is not a simple task to get a good forum going. But here's a few ideas I had:
- Make the threads visible without signing up, so when you are engaging with someone online, you can link them to a post that may answer there question (thus, they see the forum, and maybe signup later) Linking to the site on various subreddits (none of them are that popular really) or strange notions could be helpful.
- Mention it to friends who are interested in philosophy, or just people who might have questions about classical theism. Maybe there should be a separate page for people with casual questions, where more experienced folk can answer, sort of like an interactive FAQ with real people.
- Lastly, if the forum continues to stall, I wonder if we couldn't convince someone with a better domain name and more traffic to host the forum. For example: the site classicaltheism.com is one of the first things that show up when you search "classical theism" (not to mention "classical theism forum" and other similar keywords). It is a site with podcast interviews of various thinkers (Feser among them) and it doesn't seem to have a dedicated forum, so maybe that's a last-resort option.
Curious what others think about this.
-JD3