I sometimes wonder if making PaperDemon more of a general site is what is hurting it. We accept almost all forms of drawn/sculpted art and by not catering to a niche, we may not be making any group really happy.

Perhaps we can remain as a general site but still cater to those groups through the events? Like have yaoi specific themes/events?

Speaking of events, I was thinking about re-introducing "Theme week". It's a simple art event where we pick a topic and members create art/writing based around that topic. I think this might be something good to start with and we'll ramp up to contests once we get more activity.

Regarding ranks, I have a first pass of the code written for it and its working great on my test deployment server. I am not sure yet if I will launch it today or tomorrow or on the weekend. I'll post a news post once it's up and running.

Ranks feature launched today.

w00t! \o/

I do not think being a general site is a bad thing at all , for instance you mentioned yaoi , witch is something I am totally not into , however some things I like others may not , focusing on one thing over others would I think make some people happier , but may drive others away . I do think we need to interact more as a community , so I am making sure to check out everyone's posts and comment . There is no better feeling than to know someone else likes your work . 

I find it funny that people leave because they don't feel it's active enough - but since I've been here I've made an effort to comment on ALMOST EVERYTHING that has been submitted (apart from the past couple of months because of my overwhelming  schedule) and though it IS really nice to have people acknowledge your work - no one else is commenting on it and those people aren't commenting on new work either.

It's great that you are trying so hard to revive the site and so many of these ideas sound really good - but ultimately if people want a community they need to do their part to create it. It's not all on you.  If people are only submitting their own work and not looking at anyone else's then there's nothing YOU can do about that.  It's on us as well.  It doesn't feel much like a community because the community isn't acting like one.

Along those lines, the only real complaint/rant I have at this point is the comment to upload ratio of fellow users.  A few of us are commenting (three!) - but so many others come to simply upload all of their work and then we hear nothing else from them.  Pages and pages of uploads and no comments.  I was commenting a lot at first but it started to feel like work.  I began picking only one or two pics per user based on the thumbnail and then even that was getting old because no one else was commenting and these users weren't paying it forward. You could do all the work on the site in the world and I'd still feel this way if the actual community interaction remained so minimal and felt so one-sided.

The ranking system is a good start (I hope) since even though it doesn't unlock anything I myself (and probably others) tend to respond well to the feeling of achievement regardless of whether or not the achievement actually gives me anything :)  Again - there is only so much that you can do though.  Once you do what you can to draw new members and keep those here engaged, we all need to get our butts into gear as well if we actually WANT that kind of community.

Bah...rant over.  That's just really been bugging me since I joined.  Feels good to get it off my chest :)

Well, I was also considering some sort of quality control myself, but that really just opens another can of worms. Now there are various ways of going about that. You can just have basic rules like on Y!Gallery, where it's just don't scan your work badly, don't take selfies with bad lighting, etc. Or you have something like Hentai Foundry that screens every work for every little thing or Newgrounds, where the QC is a community effort. There are various advantages and disadvantages for all of them, but I'm not entirely sure if they're successful at getting more people to come--or they may just attract a specific target audience. That depends on if you are trying to get a specific audience to come. But if you just want anyone and everyone, that might not be a good idea at this point. But if the problem is too many artists and not enough viewers who will take the time to comment, it might not matter that much. Besides, it can be more appealing to viewers if you can guarantee that there is some form of quality in your gallery.

Personally, I think it's okay if you want a general site that fits everyone. I think if you have a site like that though, you should also make it easy for people to find what they're looking for. Perhaps encouraging people to start groups would help there.

If you want more viewers rather than people who just come to upload, perhaps try some features or events that support commissions. Sometimes, people browse on galleries because they want to commission people.

one thing i just thought of that might help attract some comics in would be some way to know when the comic has updated - i plan to update my comic here 3 or 4 times a month , if there was a most recent update showing on the comic people would know when a new page was up . just an idea...:)

I'm not good at the popularity thing, but I know that a lot of people in the last few years moved from DA to Tumblr for a few reasons.

1- The rules on DA favour some nudity over others,

2- The amount of comments people were getting were less

3- It was easier to find your fandoms on Tumblr

4- Cause the site coding is becoming a screwed up mess of accessories and spam. 

Obviously PD doesn't have an issue for the first one. PD has a really cool and simple policy on nudity which is really refreshing.

The amount of comments I got I noticed dropped significantly after groups were introduced to DA, I assume cause of spam. People would submit a picture to 20 groups to get noticed, but what ends up happening is that the average user actually shuts off cause their inbox is getting 1000 deviations in an hour. Many groups only allow a submission a week or day, and it still gets slammed. I know if a group has over 1000 deviations in it, I don't even bother looking through it.

With Tumblr, I can't explain why people moved to there of all places. I think they'd move to Pixv is it were in English? I think that the interface makes the user feel like they have more control over how they browse though. Specially with the Xkit extension. You can make a side blog of a single thing you have interest in and people that are interested can follow and interact with 1 to 1 just that and it remains separate to your other stuff and not associated to your main blog unless you want it to be, blacklist words that trigger bad memories, or ignore blogs that post content that doesn't interest you, liking things is a very easy to find button, you can show people that follow you stuff that you like and you can spread the word super fast of cool things. I don't know how that feel can be applied to an art community.... I think though that the freedom that Tumblr has is a big appeal to it's following. People feel free to talk about relevant topics and feel free to post what ever they want cause the people following you theoretically want to see it, and if they don't, they just unfollow, and finding new blogs is organic, cause you find them by having a popular post that gets shared. 

I don't know if any of this helps. One could say that people on the net just need to calm down cause it's just art, but there's also a lot of sense in making people feel like they have a personal experience. A lot of people are starting to want to have an anon type persona that they can go wild with, and seeing other things that person liked can help you find things that you might like too. Deviantart has art roulettes on the side of the page of stuff in their gallery / stuff similar / other junk they've since added that has again cluttered it too much. Whether it's worth introducing though is another thing.

I wonder too sometimes if art communities aren't entirely what people want anymore. I mean, it's efficient for art, but people are commenting less on art now, and sharing it more, interacting with the artist outside of the art via chat. They want others to see art/ists they love, but they don't nessecarily have the words to convey thier love on each piece of art.

Sorry- this is something I've thought a lot about, and perhaps I'm over thinking it based on what I see, and not the reality of what people want. I hope what I mean came through in my garble?

I really love that the rules for submission are quite clear (none of the fuzzy DA haze or confusion over why some things are removed and others not) and I also love that there aren't such strict limitations on what we can upload. (I can't upload to Elfwood because my fantasy drawings aren't fantasy enough O_o).

Some can certainly draw faster and upload more than others (I'm SO slow, seriously -_-") which tends to flood the recent submissions page with only a small variety of artists at times. I don't see any way around that without messing with those points I just made about my own upload freedoms though :)

That I can see how many different artists have uploaded since I last checked on the front page (without expanding the newest submissions list to see each new piece) is seriously cool. I love that so much :D

If people don't want a community and just want a place to show other's what they have done then power to them.  I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing at all.  Losing interest because your art dump isn't getting enough recognition/comments though??  That's where my comment to upload ration pet peeve comes into play. ("comment" really just meaning interacting with others at all really. SO many forum posts only have between 0-3 replies now.  Users are reaching out but no one is biting.)  
Hopefully we do attract more who want to get to know more artists and participate in community events like themes and the like :)

I know that I managed to make a couple of really good friends on DA that way, and when one of the more skilled artists spent some time with me in a chat room in DA they helped me a lot with both my technique and my confidence.  It's that sort of thing I am personally looking for, and I know there will be some other like-minded people out there who want something similar.  My fingers are crossed ^_^ But I'm also linking this site to those who share my point of view as well. 

Well ja, a more focused chat could be a good idea. Not sure how much effort it requires to make more chat options to allow that, but I find on DA that chats like Artgerm are much more useful for critique than any number of critique groups there. I tend to find one of the problems with critique groups is that people just post there because that's what the group is for, but there are far fewer people that show up there just to offer constructive critique. If there are one or two people doing the critique because the group belongs to them, they don't have time to go over everything that gets submitted there. This kind of imbalance makes it difficult for critique exchange type groups to do well. I find in a chat setting, people just naturally gravitate there and help if they can just for being there.