cjk , 13 days 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.

<span style="color:#323232;">    1998 |   6686
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    1999 |  40528
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2000 |  70379
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2001 |  41129
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2002 | 171294
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2003 | 203642
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2004 | 204685
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2005 | 173659
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2006 | 150000
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2007 | 135936
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2008 | 126283
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2009 |  94894
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2010 |  70333
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2011 |  48691
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2012 |  31197
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2013 |  30606
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2014 |  30227
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2015 |  29334
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2016 |  25472
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2017 |  27505
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2018 |  28551
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2019 |  22366
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2020 |  17250
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2021 |  12794
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2022 |  10135
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    2023 |   7151
</span>

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