Im not sure if Ruven is willing to play under someone else's rules. But Im not sure if Ruven remembers he has this place, or that his name us Ruven, so...
I'm hesitant to pester the entire userbase, unless there's a good reason to do so. If activity picked up, or there was some kind of cool sitewide event that might interest former posters, that might be a reason to blast an email. As for 2 & 3, those would cost money and change the site from what it is now to something different. I'm not opposed to change, but doing 2&3 would require selling ads on the site and having rules about what you can do/say throughout the site. We'd turn into every other forum with rules and little pissy fights and people reporting each other for every little offense.
Having some really good content would help. We need people to write well articulated, thoughtful articles which could then be promoted to the main page. We do get search engine hits and even new members from the front page. We even got a couple of members from the celebrity death pool being on the front page. Good articles would bring people by and give them a reason to stay. There are some things we can do to make the site a little more interactive. If there's interest I'll add the plugin that will let us bet on games and pretty much anything else we want to gamble on. That way the trophy points become DSP dollars and we have something to do with them. Not sure what else they would be good for....maybe a facebook style scheme where you could spend your DSP dollars and promote your content to the front page for a while.
For me part of the culture IS that it's not a huge site... after a while debating on various topics you actually get to know someone a little and THAT is what provides value to me. But I agree that there is a certain minimum of 'fresh news and views' required to maintain critical mass and we run dangerously close to losing that critical mass sometimes. Thus I'm even more thankful for the energy directed here by Limey and Irish and the core group who tend to look out for the overall balance. Thanks to all for that. Some sports blogs have soooo much noise and stray near random hot headed opinions that I can see why they ban certain posters who engage in flaming posts as their sport of choice. Here we get Ruven on a periodic rant against "The Man" but otherwise people are fairly restrained. We do need more members to assure divergent views and this has turned out to be a primarily Dodger focused group with stray but isolated opinions elsewhere. I didn't agree with many of BryanV21's views but he was the only other Buckeye in the group and really no one here cares much about football and all care even less about hockey. But we're SoCal based so what do we expect? I will say as a relative newcomer that I DO think about my DSP buddies when I hear a sports story that interests me and try to locate a computer to share though I spend too much time on the road to be consistent. Considering how many have been banned by PSD perhaps we need to hack their list of banned posters and continue to promote DSP as a place to share without a net Nanny overlooking each thread?