BMG is slowly dying

Question

Let me put it simply: BMG, which was a good idea at first, is dying, to the point that we're not scheduling new ones, we're not hearing about it, we forgot that there was meant to be one on Tuesday, we tried to schedule one same time today and forgot again.

So, what should we do about this?

Answer 1

BMG's time has now been changed

Me and Redwolf agree that the time and day cycle for BMG was difficult to keep track of, and this made it too easy to miss, and difficult to register for. We've decided to change the times it occurs on.

BMG will now take place every other Wednesday, alternating between 12am UTC and 12pm UTC

We figured these times would fit decently with most users, while making it easier to keep track of. These have also been added as two scheduled events which are recurring. You can register for either of them, and you'll receive a chat ping 30 minutes before the event will begin to let you know, and this ping will happen every four weeks (per event), so you don't have to re-register for each new BMG.

The next BMG is scheduled for the 11th of August, at 00:00 UTC.

Fingers crossed this improves activity a bit!

Answer 2

A couple of speculations and suggestions:

1. Activity has seemed low to me for the past while. Maybe this is my own bias, but I've noticed TNB seems to be having longer and more frequent periods of no messages. I think this is due to it being the summer now, and a lot of people are more active during weekdays that aren't holidays/vacation days, when people are at work or school (this is definitely a coincidence, by the way). Thus, a possibility is to just call it off for this and next time, and resume in September.
2. Tracking the day and time is kind of annoying. Perhaps we could just put it on the 1st and 14th of every month (or some easy-to-remember cycle like that) and tracking the time shift is the only thing to really remember? Figuring out when it is only takes like a minute or two so this shouldn't really fix BMG dying.
3. We could just replace BMG. The novelty is wearing off, and we have other chat event suggestions that we could do in its place; for example, the esolang showcase or the more recent similar suggestions, Learn-a-Lang.

Answer 3

A part of this, in my opinion, is because we don't have enough interesting CMCs. Last time, we rushed to make new ones after it started. To remedy this, I propose we encourage people to post CMCs at any time, way before the BMG starts, so that there's enough good ideas and ample time to vote on them.