I remember when this MB was rated highly (or possibly top) of a ‘most posts’ rating on a site dedicated to rating message boards.
Back then, If you posted to a thread or made a thread, and then re-visited an hour later and your thread was near the top of the first page - this meant that your thread had been bumped up to the top many many times.
Nowadays, a thread can stay at the top by virtue of the fact that so few people post in the other threads.
This is a sad fact. What happened/what did someone do to destroy the popularity of the SDMB?
Hi Lobsang
Yeah, now that you mention it, I used to post a lot more often than I do now. I especially liked GQ, not only for asking questions, but (if I were fast enough), for answering questions too.
Well, that’s an answer from my own subjective point of view. It would be interesting to hear what others have to say.
Overall I suspect that you’re imagining this though. If you look at our stats from the last year on big-boards.com we’ve been steadily growing over the last year.
There are cycles. Busy times of the year, busy times of the week, and busy times of the day. But right now, the apparent slump, if there is one, can probably be attributed to a combination of slow time of year, week, and day.
Though there have been a couple of exoduses recently, so that may factor in, though it’s hard to tell how big they were.
And how permanent they were – I’ve seen several people who left, with a rather emphatic slamming of the door, during The Recent Unpleasantness, and are now posting here again.
We certainly get a lot of traffic at points, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never been that large in comparison to the truly high-traffic boards out there, and have never been near the top ten, let alone number one.
Unless there’s info that I’m missing, big-boards just shows the number of posts over the last year, as well as the total number of posts and members (but not active members). That’s not enough information to assess whether the board used to move more quickly.
What we’d really want is a breakdown of the number of threads, posts and new registrations by year. To add to the anecdotes, I also remember the board moving much more quickly when I first joined.
I also wonder how much of it might do with being out of a very long election cycle? We spent over a year with threads in most subjects on Obama/Clinton/Bush/Cheney/Palin/McCain/Romney not to mention all the others.
Now that it is over, that reduces a lot of typical SDMB thread topics.
I think the point is that it only shows the last year. A longer period would be helpful.
ISTR that lot of people left when we went pay to post. Some have returned now that it’s free, but I’m not sure we ever recovered. I’d like to see the statistics for then and compare the statistics for now.
Boards, like anything else in life, tend to mature over time. They go from extremely exciting, building up a group of very witty, intelligent posters, to bulging at the seams, then they begin a gradual decline. Not that there isn’t still a group of intelligent posters here. But some things just get done to death and it’s hard to come up with the next big thing to keep things expanding. Just my opinion.
While there is a small dedicated core of members who have been here forever and will stay forever (and thankyouverymuch!) it’s more typical for people to dip in and out of message board life.
Change happens – people start and leave school, they get and lose jobs, they hook up with partners, they have children. Work gets more involved. Disposable time becomes less so and priorities get assigned. And sometimes what was interesting last year or two years ago is supplanted by other more interesting things that get replaced in their turn as well.
For whatever reason, people wander off. Sometimes they come back. More often they are replaced by other people. That’s life. (That’s what people say.)
I don’t know Tuba, you’ve been here forever…in fact I’m starting to think you’re like Cecil…or the Dread Pirate Roberts.
"‘I am not TubaDiva’ he said. ‘My name is Ryan; I inherited the title from the previous TubaDiva, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real TubaDiva either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Tuba has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Patagonia.’
You’re going to have to work on your name recognition Marley. Right now you just don’t have the punch that TubaDiva does. You’re name just doesn’t evoke a deep history and depth of knowledge about all things SDMB that Tuba’s does. Unless you can toss off details of MelinGate, then you’re just not quite there.
I could tell you things about MelinGate that you don’t know, and things about the board that would curl/uncurl/make your hair fall out, but I’d end up in a shallow grave with the mouthpiece of a tuba through my heart.
Nothing. It’s not a fact at all. The board has more traffic now than at any other period in the past, except for a while in 2003, when it was about 20% faster.
A quick way to examine board traffic over the years is to look at the time period it takes to accumulate one million posts. This has been remarkably steady at roughly 9-10 months for the past six years.
The actual figures:
Start: 3/12/99
20.5 months to 1 million (12/26/00)
16.5 months to 2 million (4/15/02)
10 months to 3 million (2/15/2003)
7 months to 4 million (9/18/03)
9 months to 5 million (6/24/04)
9 months to 6 million (3/29/05)
9.5 months to 7 million (1/15/06)
10 months to 8 million (11/26/06)
10 months to 9 million (9/20/07)
10 months to 10 million (7/14/08)
8.5 months to 11 million (4/2/09)
I have not tried to take into account The Winter of Our Missed Content, which of course would have lowered the post count for that period. (Off hand, I don’t recall when it was.)
The perception of board traffic may be affected by the addition of forums. If you think that threads don’t fall off the front page as fast as they used to, remember that many of the posts that now go in Cafe Society, one of our most popular forums, used to go in GQ (or maybe IMHO). If we had the same arrangement as before, GQ would probably be twice as fast as it did before. Likewise, many threads now in The Game Rame would previously have gone in MPSIMS or GQ.
On the other hand, if you look at the time to reach a multiple of 50,000 threads, you could be justified in concluding that new threads are posted more slowly these days than they were in the period immediately preceding pay-to-post:
