cjk

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.

Fair.

to be honest, dumb opinions from famous people spread like a virus before social media as well.