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[NullForceOmega]

Let's not go there shall we?  This isn't about Neo, it's about a forum members's concerns about decreasing activity.

[Yoink]

My internet sucks these days and typing out my usual nonsensical/enlightened rambles is a fair bit more difficult on a phone keyboard, especially when it comes to formatting.
Also it feels as though I've been busier than I used to be, or something... plus, less activity on the forum means less things to respond to.

Those are my reasons for being less active, anyway.

[misko27]

I post less becomes I'm always depressed and I spread my time out more, but I come here in fits and starts. Sometimes I'm gone for a long time, or I'm here very intently for a while. It's probably similar all over, really. The forum doesn't seem much less active to me.

The forum should perk up again with the Myth/Magic release.

I'll probably have to try playing DF again when that comes. Or maybe when I get a new computer. Either/or, really. New computer would mean more space (I use so much space holy shit, I'm a virtual packrat. But I really need this file that generates markov-chains for comments, it's very important! And that thing, and also that other thing, and of course this thing here...) and probably be faster, while new release would give an excuse to relearn things.

[Baffler]

It's not gonna die but I've definitely noticed the DF boards slowing down significantly, and the 42.XX releases did pick it up a bit but not as much as I expected it to. Adventureboard has always been slow but DFGD, CG&S, and Fortboard had all (or at least almost all) of the threads on their front page active as of that day for the longest time, which is no longer the case. FG&RP has slowed down more by volume, but the upperboards are practically a ghost town compared to what they were two years ago.

[Flying Dice]

Panic threads about the future of the forum, it's just like old times.

Sure brings back the memories, yeah.

Speaking of, My Name is Immaterial is still apparently collating data semi-frequently, with the most recent addition being May of last year. There are always upticks around major releases. Right now we're in a trough bleeding down from the minor peak in early 2016 back towards the natural state of the forum.

There has been a slow decline in average PPM, but, uh. Bluntly, that's because in the past couple years a lot of the highest-volume posters who couldn't control themselves well enough ended up banned.

And shit, stuff happens. I have barely been on at all the past while because of RL messes piling up.

I don't see how anybody can still believe that Neonivek wasn't trolling. It's plainly obvious from that perspective, where as every other perspective comes out as pure confusion.

All I have to say on that matter is that the time or two I played D&D with him on Roll20, he wasn't anywhere near as confused/oblivious as he came across in text. I don't know the dude personally, I can't say whether he had something else going on, so I'm not going to judge one way or another. Will note that if he was trolling, he's the most convincing actor I've ever seen, because his tone and mannerisms didn't shift at all, at least as far as I could see. Honestly inclined to think that Neo just had trouble parsing tone in text.

[Tawa]

I feel like GD has slowed down a bit recently, but not to a major extent. Normal forum lull.

I do, however, think it feels a bit quieter and emptier, if not less active, than it did in my earlier days here. I know a lot of the regulars from back when I came to GD circa early 2014 have drifted away and gotten banned since then--2016 especially was a graveyard, though LSP, Temp, BFEL, and Lagslayer used to be pretty prominent as well, IMO. And that's just the banlist; there's a lot of people who have just kind of mysteriously disappeared (KingofstarrySkies and TamerVirus spring to mind.)

I also kind of feel like GD has grown a kind of unspoken tension as time's gone on. Not nearly as many silly, light-hearted discussions and conversations in the threads anymore (anyone else remember the pun-ic wars?) Arguments quickly get heated and one side kind of slowly withdraws until the discussion ends. Sad thread is full of crushing despair*, happy thread activity seems oddly sporadic.

I still have Bay12 open whenever I'm at home, but I feel like I pay more attention to the Bay12 Discord nowadays. Doesn't feel as intimidating, I guess, and a fair number of familiar faces I don't see around here much these days.

FG&RP is still its own beast, but I do want to mention that freeforms seem to be more or less dead. Metric h*ckton of "Arms Race" games, whatever those are, and an active FEF community, but ye olde flood of Magic Girls games and whatever is a thing of the past. Mafia is a ghost town and the traditional forum games (of the player-above-you variety) are pretty quiet.

*I should add that venting about one's troubles isn't a bad thing, but it feels like "everything will be ok" style responses and posts of middling seriousness are much more infrequent. I'd make those sorts of responses myself, but I never know what to say

[Doomblade187]

We have a bay12 discord? As in, somewhat official?

[Frumple]

Pretty sure not particularly official, but there definitely is one. Could swear I remember more than one, even.

[Egan_BW]

Toady should probably start an official discord server if there's so much conflict.

I'm not particularly worried about the forum dying, but then I mostly lurk down in the murky depths of RTD, playing five different flavors of magic-user.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I will say that if we're gonna talk forum changes, take all that official discords and moderator elections and just throw that shit out. If we need anything it's a forum software update.

A fixed search feature, threadmarks, and attachments could make a world of difference for people's involvement in the forums. I'm sure there's plenty of other little things.

Of course, Toady doesn't have control over SMF's update schedule, but given how they've been shitting the bed for the past four years a migration might be worth considering. It would probably also increase his overhead, though I would argue that a forum able to compete better with SB, SV, or SA might pull in more donations as more people prefer to use it. I'm just saying, it worries me a bit that I go to AltHist, which is by no means cutting edge, and feel a wave of relief in how easily I can find and do stuff compared to here.

[Egan_BW]

I quite like this software, actually. I don't want us to switch to some weirdo counterintuitive interface just so we can have some extra features I won't use.

[Maximum Spin]

I quite like this software, actually. I don't want us to switch to some weirdo counterintuitive interface just so we can have some extra features I won't use.

Definitely. SMF is superior to these other crappy elaborate shitfests.

[Maximum Spin]

Hell, I've seen people try to use it on these forums, by referencing people with @name despite it not actually doing anything (as compared to other forum software).

Eh, @name was a standard way to indicate who you're talking to before it became something with actual code attached in any forum software, so chances are that they're just trying to do that, not actually expecting it to do something.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

More than anything else I want threadmarks. It's hard to have a structured thread run long without it, and I don't even play forum games which I'm sure would benefit from it. Once you've spent some time with them the idea of not having them just comes off as senseless, and frankly I don't know what's going on with SMF that they're repeatedly breaking their search function instead of adding threadmarks.

As for the rest - you'd have to ask, I guess. But let's not pretend like SMF is elegant and minimalist, I mean look at this shit

help I am a walrus plox

Code: [Select]

What the duck did you just ducking say about me you little quack
What is this even for

Also you can email threads to people, which is either useless or harassment depending on what the end product looks like.

[Reelya]

You can see some of the stats here: stats.  It doesn't give monthly breakdowns by forum unless I missed something, so it's not immediately clear where the falloff is.

Anecdotally, it does appear that there's less activity in the community games and in the DF related boards in general.  Could be a lot of reasons why, but for me at least that's because I got burned out on community games.  As a result, I also don't play DF very much anymore, which means I'm not really qualified to answer questions in those forums these days.  Accordingly, I don't post there unless I happen to stumble into a rare topic that nobody has replied to yet which I also definitively know the answer to.

My inclination would be to say that not as many people play DF now, and that its heyday appeared to be around the DF2012 era, but I don't have any real proof of that.  Donations haven't dropped off, but then maybe many donations come from people like me who support the project even if they don't play the game much these days.

Don't trust the raw stats too much, for example while there were 6799 new topics in 2017, when you drill down, 2268 of them were in September, and drilling down further, 1917 of those were created on September 7th, 2017. So it was 1900+ threads of spam or something like that.

However, when you look at total concurrent online users, it might spike up after new versions are released. e.g. after DF 42.01 came out in december 2015, the number online started solidly climbing over the next several months before dropping back off. Remember, no new versions came out for the last 18 months, but there is one now. Before that, version 34.01 came out in Feb 2012, with a big spike of users in that month. And 40.01 came out in July 2014, and you can see another big user spike around that date.

In between those spikes, the max. online users has stayed from 600-800 since 2010.