Is Bughouse Dying?


This blog entry probably will be my most controversial, well, controversial in terms of relations with Bughouse. So, right off the bat let me say this here and now that what I am going to write is in no way meant as disrespectful to Rusty and the rest of the wonderful administrators of Bughouse. So why am I writing about a critique on Bughouse? Because I am concerned, concerned that NEIU’s only real online presence may be fading away. Fading away? Bugspray are you nuts? If you’re saying that right now, please bear with me and I will explain.

Not many of you may remember the first Bughouse which came out almost four or five years ago. It was, in terms of appearances nothing like the gem we have now. Indeed it did have its problems. The one thing it did have though (which also ironically proved its undoing) was it had activity. In the end though, this caveman version of Bughouse was shut down because of possible libellous actions by some members and basically the damn thing got out of hand. It would be almost a year (I believe, but could be wrong here) until a new Bughouse was up and running.

The advent of the new Bughouse inspired hope in me that maybe just maybe it would serve as a pillar in a move to unite our apathetic student base. Ok, I know now that was a tall order. Bughouse, though, when it first came online did manage, in my eyes at least, to get students talking to each other. Many remember the great debates, be it politics or religion or even the SGA. Students, who on campus would not even notice each other, were conversing and learning from each other! You had people on every political spectrum, and even some wackos who wouldn’t be part of any tent, engaging each other in an arena of ideas. By the second update of the new Bughouse, we had hundreds of members!

Now, though, things have changed. Perhaps you have noticed this? Over time, less and less people have been participating on Bughouse. Today the site boasts 476 members, yet going back to the Fall semester or Summer, I’ve seen the same 7-9 people basically making up 90% of the postings. What is going on here?

It is natural to lose some members, many will graduate and go on with their lives holding Bughouse as a chapter they are not in anymore, while some will simply forget about the site. The site has been getting new members, and this seems to come in spurts, mainly in the beginning of a semester. Yet out of the wave of new members, I have seen only one or two replace those we’ve lost in the past year. Every time I am on this site, I see that we have a new member, yet we never hear from them.

This all seems a bit odd for me. Here we get tons of new members, yet they are mainly no-shows. And rarely do I see more than 6 people online at the same time. Yet, according to the statistics page, it shows on February 4th of this year (that’s a Saturday in case you’re wondering) at 5:49 in the morning we had 58 members! 58 people, holy cow! What the hell was going on at nearly 6 in the morning on a Saturday here?!? Was there some big debate, was it the arcade?

Another odd peculiarity has been with the blogs. I was very excited to learn that we would have blogs (c’mon who doesn’t want their own soapbox??). Joe and many others had their blogs up before I did (I just couldn’t think of anything to write) and I was impressed at the number of views they were receiving. Joe’s alone on his first few entries had almost 200 hits. I figured either that was 200 people, or maybe a tenth of that coming from people refreshing the page to see if the Old Man had updated. When I got mine up and running I was happy to see I was getting about 10 hits a day. “Cool!” I thought.

But then something funny was starting to happen. I started to notice big jumps in the number of views I was getting, and I started watching the other blogs as well. At first I excited that so many people were looking at my blog, but then I grew suspicious. In the beginning I was getting on average 3-8 hits a day, then there would a “dry” period where I would get a big spurt in views. By big spurt, I’m not saying 10 hits, but like a hundred! There was even a brief period where I wasn’t posting anything yet the number of total views for my blog doubled! The same was going on for Old Man Joe (who told me he got 1500 hits in seven days!) and, get this people who didn’t even post an entry wound up with 100-200 hits.!

Now we can all see that someone coming along and finding Bughouse may look at the blogs, particularly at the university. But in the years I’ve been at Northeastern, given the level of student apathy at things university-related, I doubt this. I was curious, maybe we were getting hits from Google or some other search engine. So, I decided to look it up via these methods. The results were that not one post, be it in the forums or the blogs, showed up on the engines. The good guy in me wants to believe all these views were legitimate, the sceptic commodities trader in me says otherwise. I’m not talking anything foul here, just that something funny is going on. When we write up our blogs, we want people to read them. But if all we’re doing is just writing something up and in reality only a tenth of those people are really seeing it, be honest and tell us. Are members and guests really reading or are they phantoms?

This brings up another important point in my mind, and that is new membership. As someone who loves Bughouse, I want to see new members. This works for all of us in many ways, new discourse on the forums, and new readers for the blogs. Hell, someone as to beat Blaz’s scores at the arcade! Yet from the looks of things, it doesn’t seem like there is a real drive to increase membership.

I still talk to people who are part of student organizations like my old home at the Independent and orgs like WZRD. From what I have been hearing, Bughouse never really made an attempt at University Day or other major student events to promote the site. Nor have they taken out any advertisements (be it paid or the free ones offered by the student paper) to get the word out. When I was on campus, I did see some small flyers, but they really went unnoticed. C’mon gang, lets get the ball rolling here! Face it, without fresh blood, this place will disappear in a semester or two!
It is not hard to get the word out on this site. Look how well the Socialists do in promoting themselves. Any more advertising by them and people will really think they are a marketing firm! Seriously though, I love Bughouse, and I have total respect for the folks that run it. I just believe we need to kick start things, light a fire under apathy’s ass and get people on Bughouse!


(Ok, not the world's greatest ad, but hey something you can use for your free ad at the paper. Something to use to drum up ideas for promoting Bughouse.)