Forum stats, speculation and conclusions

Lazybones · May 26, 2026, 08:30:02 PM

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 · May 27, 2026, 05:55:32 AM

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 · May 27, 2026, 10:08:22 AM

It is nice having independent systems with history.

Mr. Analog · May 27, 2026, 10:17:01 AM

Quote from: Lazybones on May 27, 2026, 10:08:22 AMIt is nice having independent systems with history.

That's for sure!!!

Lazybones · May 27, 2026, 10:59:59 AM

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

Mr. Analog · May 27, 2026, 11:05:44 AM

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

Darren Dirt · Reply #6 - Re: Forum stats, speculation and conclusions

This forum was a big part of my life for a huge chunk of years.

Wish there was an easy way of snapshot archiving it all with a single command execution... would be of great value to my current mental health journey now that I am starting therapy in a very real way.

Miss those early days, guys. And miss how simple life seemed back then (even if not entirely true).

Lazybones · Reply #7 - Re: Forum stats, speculation and conclusions

Quote from: Darren Dirt on Yesterday at 01:15:47 PMThis forum was a big part of my life for a huge chunk of years.

Wish there was an easy way of snapshot archiving it all with a single command execution... would be of great value to my current mental health journey now that I am starting therapy in a very real way.

Miss those early days, guys. And miss how simple life seemed back then (even if not entirely true).

Well the posts slow down when people stop showing up to post.

The forum has been exported and imported among several systems already, we are still thinking of doing another re-platform, but the effort to run, secure, patch is getting higher vs the amount of actual use the forum gets.