• cjk@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.

    It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).

    But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.

        1998 |   6686
        1999 |  40528
        2000 |  70379
        2001 |  41129
        2002 | 171294
        2003 | 203642
        2004 | 204685
        2005 | 173659
        2006 | 150000
        2007 | 135936
        2008 | 126283
        2009 |  94894
        2010 |  70333
        2011 |  48691
        2012 |  31197
        2013 |  30606
        2014 |  30227
        2015 |  29334
        2016 |  25472
        2017 |  27505
        2018 |  28551
        2019 |  22366
        2020 |  17250
        2021 |  12794
        2022 |  10135
        2023 |   7151
    

    If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.

    • macrocephalic@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it’s normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.

    • Scrollone@feddit.it
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      5 months ago

      From your stats, it’s clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.

      • cjk@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.

        But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.