The number of names I recognize but have not seen in years is telling. Admittedly many of the posts here were lurkers popping their heads up to explain their lurkitude. So many of those folks may still be lurking invisibly today. May.
So where to from here?
None of the facts or arguments have really changed in the intervening 8+ years. But clearly our rate of decline did slow a bunch, or we’d already be gone. And that’s despite the amazing to me number of people who flounced out when we moved to Discourse.
I think at this point substantially everyone who posts more than a couple posts per week are going to be lifers. More and more of us are retirees, where free time is plentiful and sedentary activities are welcome. IMO what we’ll see going forward is just the slow steady shrinkage attributable to morbidity and mortality among the lifers. We’re each going to be carried out of here on a plank, and not a day sooner.
It was interesting reading this thread. Makes me wonder what the rules about zombies are, if they still exist at all. And if I am at it: what is it with warnings nowadays? Are they still applied? I have the impression I have not read about bans or thread bans for a while. Don’t tell me we, the ones that are left, are all polite and boring now.
You’re allowed to bump a zombie if you’re adding something substantive and new to the discussion. In this case, the mere existence of the board at this time gave the bump substantive content.
And yes, there are still warnings and bans. It might be that you’re just not hanging out in the same sort of threads as the nasty people. Every so often throughout the history of the board, we’ve had posters who made valuable contributions but who also had a pattern of misbehavior, and we’ve reluctantly had to ban them when the misbehavior outweighed the positive contributions. Those always get a lot of attention when they happen… but they’ve only ever been a small fraction of the bannings. Most of the time when we ban someone, nobody really misses them, because even when they’re not breaking the rules, they’re not really adding much, either.
Ninja’d by @Chronos but I have some actual statistics so I’ll go ahead and post this anyway.
In FQ, we allow zombies, but we prefer that you only raise zombie threads to contribute something of value (i.e. new information, some news items that is relevant, etc). We’re a lot more flexible about zombie posts in other forums. Best case, it revives the conversation and allows some more interesting discussion. Worst case, the thread just sinks back down to where it came from. No biggie.
This has been our position on zombies for quite some time now. It’s nothing new. But it is a change from the old days when zombies were very strongly frowned upon.
Yes, warnings are still applied. We had about 10 to 15 warnings per month in 2020 and 2021. That dropped to about 5 to 10 warnings per month in 2022 and has stayed relatively constant around that level ever since, except for one big spike in October/November of 2025.
The number of warnings and number of bans is generally following the same slow decline that we are seeing in the number of posts, which is pretty much what you’d expect. Fewer people, fewer warnings. It’s just a slow decline though, nothing dramatic.
Considering that most message boards have completely dried up and disappeared, we’re doing much, much better than most these days.
Now old Zombies in Cafe Society that are heavy in misogyny will get closed instead.
For Great Debates & Politics & Elections threads for tired subjects will get closed instead. Our tolerance for Conspiracy Theories is lower I guess and we have 6 subjects that are now done.
Ah, yes, the Rules! Haven’t read them in a while, I must admit, but the part you quote sounds reasonable and easy to adhere to. I am surprised that there is no mention of planes on threadmills.
ETA: Treadmill, I meant. Without the freudian “h”.
It looks like the average daily members are around 320. But that is a different criteria from the 4063 in the OP. I don’t have a similiar stat for Discourse.
Just for some comparison to Reddit I will note that the small, regional r/Cleveland has almost 200,000 members.There is actually a Straight Dope sub Reddit at r/sdmb. It has 95 members. And a discussion of the alternate ending for Big. More popular subs have hundreds of thousands of members. askReddit which is probably close to the feel of the SDMB has 75 million members.
