Forum stats, speculation and conclusions

[Lazybones]

So things have been slow here so I figured I would go look at the actual stats.

Thoughts and speculations.

1. I think most conversations have moved out of the forum we have only had 8 topics and 51 posts in all of 2026 so far. The decline over the years is obvious with this year being a huge dip as we are almost half way.
2. Most online vs new members, seems to indicated we had a high bot problem in 2012 and 2025 but now we have almost no new members.. sign up is ether broken or our bot protection is working, the bots are only read only scraping the site now with thousands of impressions.

[Mr. Analog]

Interesting!

I feel with Discord implementing age verification it might bring some folks back. Also while messenger is good we lose a lot of fun links over time.

I'd hate to see this place go though, more than 20 years worth of content...

[Lazybones]

It is nice having independent systems with history.

[Mr. Analog]

It is nice having independent systems with history.

That's for sure!!!

[Lazybones]

Hmm Discourse supports real time chat I wonder if we should consider a migration again https://www.discourse.org/features

[Mr. Analog]

I set up Discourse at home to see what it was like for my own community. It's very powerful and feature rich!