I'll give the thread another read-through tommorow after work to find any more talking points, but a few things I'll point out now.
A reminder, this thread is intended to be about what we, the LFS community, can do in lieu of fresh content / features - what we can do with what we have, and not what we might have in the future.
Promotion of the leagues is definitely a key item, but that takes time and when the league administration staff is short, it means two or three people doing the work that would best be done by 4 or 5 people. Doing the streams, articles, et al became much more difficult when drivers started practicing in private servers, away from the view of competitors. It was always beneficial to me, not just as an administrator of the league, but also for the events I commentated to be able to be in the league's server with many of the teams from the competitive to the backmarker rungs, with everyone discussing at least generics. The point is that something happened a few years ago to the "openness" of practice that was so beneficial to everyone.
There is a problem indeed in the realm of the past regular participants have gotten older, more responsible, more real-life oriented instead of sim-racing oriented. Somehow, there was a disconnect between this most recent generation and the new generation. I'm thinking that the lack of public practice was what broke the chain. Public practice would populate a server, and someone looking for some server with people in would join, and while not often, but enough they'd start talking with those in server, and find out about league racing that way.
They don't have that anymore. That bit of between event interaction, and word-of-mouth promotion, is what helped make things so big. The people that couldn't race for whatever reason, would at least check out a stream if any to see how the races went. They learned while being in the server, they had fun, they made friends. The interaction gave LIFE to the game, it helped infuse the racing spirit into a new generation.
I'm not feeling entirely misguided in my rant about league attendance as it was stated in the OP, but I'm also now of the notion that the spirit of days gone by is the real culprit. Nothing to do with slow development, nothing to do with complainers on a forum, nothing to do with anything other than people. The nature of people, their thoughts and doings.
I'm 98% sure if we get that spirit back, that camaraderie, that involvement, that friendliness back, it will, in time, improve the community's spirit. It will take the mind off of the slow progression of development, it will give cause to support this work that has served all of us for so long with so much, for such a little price.
Call me unrealistic, call me idiotic in this theory, call me an idealist if you want. But if you do, ask yourself this one question:
What, other than money or because you enjoy it, is a big driving factor in participation in anything group-based?
Camraderie
. This is the main reason that centralization fails on here.
. I would like to see us here at LFS have something like this website ( http://racing-reference.info/ ) for our events, but that would be asking a LOT.
). In single driver events they don't seems to care too much, but it will be a problem when the endurance season is going to start. The mentalities of many drivers was already an obstacle to camaraderie and the MPR extractor is going to do even more damage! (more than I wanted to admit)
... Only thing there really is to improve on how it is right now is to have some sort of base set for the cars available posted in the race discussion threads to help people out. But in general there isn't anything big to improve on in that regard imo, the community is already pretty good and the amount of childish insults has reduced a lot from the past