Well we really don't have a base in the forum besides general chaos or insanity. I mean we say that we're built around RP and Stories, basically uncensored creative works. Yet the Rec Room is at the bottom, and Creative Endeavors has barely anyone posting but the artists and the occasional story writer.
On Cataclysm we had a game as a basis of sanity in the insanity of general discussion. Besides the forum format is really dated even then for general discussion, especially since Skype, IRC, Reddit, 4Chan, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter are all general discussion in one way or another with a much better UI to go with it.
Hell I'm starting to lose interest in the forum mainly because we don't have the tools, focus, or general style of an independent forum. Not to mention there's not that many people or guests for that matter. You wanna know who all those guests are? Its people that hit the "back" button on their page to head back to the previous page, instead of hitting New/Recently updated topics.
Iwaku is weird and its quality is up and down across the board, but it has a strong base of RP'ers and dorks. How'd they get it? I don't fucking know, most likely advertising or word of mouth. But we don't have the cash, or sever power to do advertising. We're just hoping someone accidentally stumbles across us here, or that people over at the Cataclysm forum get fed up and leave to come here. As much as a disagree with the Cataclysm policy it apparently didn't affect much and their userbase is ignorant of what happened in the depths of general discussion or the Rec Room.
Our userbase is mainly focused on whether or not we get lucky enough to be "discovered" by the masses. Which we won't, we don't even appear on a fucking Google search we're that obscure. The only thing I guess we could do is branch out to other sites, write there and have the forum as a background thing; eventually someone will get curious enough and click the link. But most story writers on the internet are usually preteen or teen weeaboos writing about their favorite magic highschool, or write about how they held hands and ate at a diner with their senpai.
Maybe I'm being the pessimist here, but we're fucked.