Forum revamp to restore activity

I agree with you 100% in regards to the main objective of the forum has to change and open up into more categories, especially the marketplace. I strongly believe we need to work harder to eliminate the leeching possibility and the only solution I can come up with is an application system. I believe this would eliminate a lot of the spam for 15 posts to begin with and could really be a good turning point going forward, allow me to give an example of this potential system;

Anti Leech

1. New user registers but cannot access any of the leak sections, throws them an error to apply for access.
   
2. The user fills in a pre-created form which then gets added to a section within the forums called Applications.
   
3. The application process is simple, the user has to be approved by a member of staff or have 5 votes for access (community-based).
   
4. Once accepted the user is then moved to another group that can access the leak sections without any issues.
   

Sounds simple enough right? Now general checkboxes would be included and permissions required before being able to fill in the form, such as the 15 post requirement. The applying user would still need 15 community posts before being able to apply. If staff are offline the community can check their posts and if seems high quality enough vote to approve, if not they can mention staff or report the thread and it can be dealt with from there.

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Strategy
I think we should be working on a better anti-leech system that is more community-driven as this would get more people involved and also reduce the volume of spam on the forums, it would allow staff more time to focus on other things such as the marketplace. NulledBB needs to be reborn in essence and a proper strategy in place to increase overall activity whilst also pushing more into a dominating forum got continued active userbase.

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V4 News
I'll touch on v4 here briefly and only briefly as I'm going to be working on something else and we'll go more into detail on this later in that thread (news article coming soon). V4 was a massive overhaul for the forums, however, it slowly came to a halt due to the time to develop as well as some horrible stuff coming up toward the end of 2020. I'm hoping we'll be seeing some progress on this going forward, I will confirm there is no plan for an onsite chatbox but I do believe there is a good place for it and some additional incentives behind including one.