Oh boy where do I begin.
It is a big issue, or rather a matrix of various social and technological issues that are interacting; it affects other communities as well so Serebii is not unique in that regard but from my experience over the last 6 or so years across different forums, Serebii is in the first or second place for communities that have been hit the hardest with "It".
Loose ideas and commentaries that I think are related to the situation of "General Forum Activity":
* Seasonal and zonal effects are... a thing. Depending on how much a proportion of writers and readers are geographically clustered in certain regions or countries, it's just going to be a fact of life that there's times of the year where barely anyone is going to be generating new content.
* Demographics as well. Without a means to refresh the population of writers, the current pool is not getting any younger, and we are getting busier with the parts of life we need to depend on. So it's important to find a good way to have ongoing writers (or readers) bring new writers in.
* Related to that is the Dead Site Negative Feedback Loop. Since activity in Serebii started dying, it has not been able to reverse course simply because there's no preventing people from getting to know other places as well. There's no people who are going to do things for no one here, either. The fact that I only ever found out about the latest iteration of the FF Awards because of a reminder on *reddit* for another user, that was posted publicly, speaks volumes: where is the Serebii Marketing Team? Where are the Serebii Cheerleaders and the Pikachu Celebi mascot?
* Over time there's been too much reliance on "live chat" platform Discord in some communities. This is worse for the community, for all communities, because Discord activity is not an observable effect to people logged in to the forum, certainly not to irregular visitors either, let alone to nonmembers considering if to join. The Discord platform is closed, hostile to third party development, not searchable and not indexable, and it definitively doesn't run well on many machines (electron client ughhh), all which means that discussions that take place in there are soon enough lost into the void and a lot of potentially useful information or potential for interaction are lost. It happened to me with TR; I had joined that community because I saw it seemed to have good worldbuilding and discussion threads, but after about six months that section of their community forum has died and instead it has moved over to Discord, where it's next to useless to me, so now I'm considering dropping TR as well.
In terms of what the current implementation has issues with and what can it change:
* Forum tech status is honestly not that of a big issue for me. One thing I like about Serebii compared to other platforms is that its default theme is quite lean, I can scroll and navigate through the forums like I was Sonic the Hedgehog. So it'd be ideal to not lose that. I'm fearful of what is going to happen with a few other communities that are preparing migrations, partly because they do have become more slow and bloated due to that focus on "modern web that a writing board doesn't need other than for the writing toolset itself.
* That doesn't mean the site can just be left to its own devices, FF.net style. Yeah we all know the memes regarding FF.net support status, if any, and the cryptid mods. More public attention to this site's maintenance status would also be nice. There was a big scare for me about a year ago when something happened to the JS of the forums that made every forum and subforum index always push the CPU to 100%, I even suspected it was a potential ransomware on the site, since it definitively was not from an external resource, and I never saw any disclosure on the subject matter, so it did push me to not really visit the site again for yet another ~3 months, so yeah that's a flight risk. To this day I have an extra blocking rule on uBlock Origin for this site just in case.
* Some facilities useful for writers would be nice to have, I guess threadmarks would be a relevant one since "everyone else is doing it" and it does automate an important amount of work for long-runners and recurrent writers, but I can think of a few other supplements or alternatives depending on what can be done on the current engine. Support for some more BBCode tags would be nice, I've fired up proposals in other forums and I could do the same here, IMO the goal would be able to provide a means to write stories in the current engine that can be copied over to or from AO3 without any significant loss of semantics. Saving drafts with the ability to work on a dedicated draft interface rather than on the posting interface would probably also be welcome in that it would more closely reflect Google Docs-style workflow.
* Certain forum sections, not just Fanfiction and writing, would benefit from a means to reflect into them the activity that takes place in related off-forum components. Serebii discord channels might be briming with worldbuilding activity, but I'll never know if I can't see that activity here. For me, this is the forum, this is the part about writing, and thus that information has to be available here. For example, an automatic system that reflects writing discussion subjects in eg.: the Discord channels for writing, or in a potential /r/serebiiwriting subreddit, as threads proper in Author's Cafe would 1.- show that there is activity going on and 2. allow people to have a searchable discussion material that they can also engage with. Ofc, Discord will most likely not let you do this, they are quite hostile to third party development, but with other chat systems that are more open such as XMPP or Mattermost, it would be near trivial to do. However a consideration point is that such means of "platform reflection" are better suited to a BBS style forum, with their short, response-oriented structure, than to Web 2.0 forum platforms, but I guess that's just another thing to study.
Writers themselves (ourselves) are also a factor, since people is a factor, so I have a few thughts on that as well:
* Writing is hard, and most of the time up until we post the new chapter or content in ready form, there's not much to show for it. There's not really a good place or a good etiquette to show in the forum "I'm re-drafting this chapter draft I though I had finished" as activity that doesn't potentially turn into noise or spam, but that needs to be fixed if we want to show that the forum has writer activity. It can't just be the end result, just like how the street-facing displays on most stores are still transparent to let you see the store inside.
* As discussion about writing migrates from the forum to live chat platforms, which are designed to pursue FOMO and persistent engagement, the attention of a writer to their writing (or to betaing for others) is contested by the attention to the livechat due to its limitations. Most of the time you *have* to be on time for a certain discussion, because afterwards it'll die down, be buried by scrollback and become unsearchable and unindexable, meaning it is a heavier material and mental cost to retireve it and examine it.
* Whether we like it or not, many writers write for the audience and the validation, and in that sense it is a problem when the site annouces, or is announced by others, to be the place to come to for X and then the writers come to do X here and the result is "0 views" / "0 replies", then it's a huge bummer and yet another reason to leave the community for other places where you get measurable response. After all, as easy as cross-posting is, it's still not zero-cost (see above on improving the toolkit), so dropping a site that doesn't give you results can lead to measurable gains. I always saw Serebii sold as "the place to go to if you want feedback on PMD material" but when I came here and posted two PMD stories that basically got 0 replies until review trades... well, after discounting the meta issues with the community dying I did still feel like I had been lied to.
Since it is part of the title, I'm going to speak also about what I consider some issues with the Fanfiction Awards.
* With the community dying, the awards can not afford to be Oscar-like elitist in terms of requriing a dying community to catwalk around their selection for them. By and large, a contest which you can only enter if your work is popular enough to be potentially grabbed for recommendation is not a quality contest: it's a popularity contest. So I think that letting writers submit their work themselves for consideration (which contests like the Oscars also do, via "For Your Consideration" submissions) would be a huge improvement. The internet is way too big and we don't and can't really owe to anyone else that our stories are eligible for readership, let alone for recommendation.
* Assembling the categories listing only *after* all entries are registered would allow for better organization. There's no need to preemptively have Best Human category in a year where all the material is PMD, for example, and we've already seen the issues with categories only getting one entrant, let alone none. This would also allow for determining the number of judges needed and effort to undertake *after* the entries are in.
* I'm on the fence on making more material prizes for the awards. Getting something like a guaranteed review would be nice, but that would have to be a review not from the judges, which means some people will have to be designated to create, compose and deliver rewards for a contest they are likely not otherwise involved with in the first place. A potential alternative would be an intermediate nomination phase, where after an initial list of entries has been made official, the entrants can only progress to the subsequent phase by participating in the creation of the prize, for example in this "free review" case, by themselves composing a review for another of the entrant stories. I'm not sure how something like this would even go if the prize was something like artwork tho, it'd likely require a pre-commit from a group in the Artists section since they'd have to be informed on the list of entrants with enough advance notice.
So, that was understandably long, I hve lots of things to say not just about Serebii but about writing communities and writing platforms in general, as I've seen many of them flourish, but also wither and die, as well as stuff to say about the culture that surrounds them. if I wanted to have a tl;dr list of suggestions to implement, which I do am working on in things for other sites as well, it would include things such as:
* better announce the things that the site / community is good at, and commit to them.
* promote interaction with other branches of the site besides simply eg.: "writers + RPers".
* improve the site's toolset for writers; pursue AO3 level of capability.
* figure out a means to prominently and progressively show that writers are working (not necessarily *publishing*).
* figure out a means to catalogue and provide interaction with writing related, off-platform sections and components.
* alternatively, refocus writing-related activity on the forum proper.
* probably get forum members a means to participate in the prizes for the awards themselves
* general stability fixes to improve the user's experience.
