Is it just me or has activity in the forums slowed down?

[OhMonty]

It seems like there was a lot more activity in the Sitepoint Forums at one time. What happened?

[Rubble]

I think it slowed down a while ago and I seem to remember there being a thread discussing it. Probably on the old forum layout.

I do not think forums are as popular these days; but I am not sure where else people are getting their answers.

[TechnoBear]

Is this the thread you were thinking of, @Rubble?

What happened to SitePoint forums?

@Rubble

I am not sure where else people are getting their answers.

Given the number of folk posting here who have been trying to learn from YouTube videos, I’d say that’s a major source. Unfortunately, it probably also accounts in part for the amount of obsolete code around. Folk don’t seem to check the publication dates of tutorials, video or otherwise.

[Rubble]

I thought it was further back than that @TechnoBear.

[SamA74]

@Rubble

I thought it was further back than that

I seem to recall a similar topic more recently…

goes to search

This is what I was thinking of:-

Are forums still pouplar?

I’m sure this question has been discussed quite a number of times and I’ve done a lot of research and still haven’t been able to come to a conclusion. So I’m asking again here: Do you think that forums as a means of exchanging information, experience and ideas are in decline because of social media or will they continue to exist? Many thanks, Torsten

[etidd]

I haven’t had any website projects for a while, so I haven’t been around, but when I have been back in the last month or so, I haven’t seen any slowdown at all. In fact, I see more participation from other people who aren’t even mentors / advisors. Still, there is the old faithful Ronpat, Paul O’B, SamA74, and others that haven’t gone away. If anything, it looks like things are constantly growing and evolving (updates to the community page platform / design, etc.). I’m not an expert, but I have become fond of reading all topics and even chiming in if I can offer any helpful pointers or insight.

Go to WebDesignForums.net and Dev Shed Forums only for a little while, and you’ll realize how much more active Sitepoint is and what a blessing it is to be here without a membership charge. Plus, Sitepoint is a company that publishes books and runs AdSense so that the community is stable and that they may even make a profit. YouTube tutorials? Well, I’ve fixed stuff on my car and computer with YouTube, but web design & development? Yeah, right… I remember starting out and going off of a video tutorial that had me design a table layout. The video was published in at least 2011 and already knew that table layouts were unfavorable.

Forums cannot die because people will go to where the experts are and where the most insight is. Around the different forum communities out there on the net, there just simply isn’t one that is more active and saturated with insightful IT professionals than Sitepoint, so I don’t see that the argument that forum activity here is slowing down holds much water.

[Mittineague]

If you go the the About page you can see some statistics

			All Time	Last 7	Last 30
Topics		125k		105		383
Posts		1.2M		1.6k	6.1k
Users		268k		300		1.0k
Active Users	—		485		1.3k
Likes		157k		986		3.4k

And the Users page is filterable / sortable for a different look at statistics.

[OhMonty]

@etidd

I haven’t seen any slowdown at all. In fact, I see more participation from other people who aren’t even mentors / advisors.

@Mittineague

If you go the the About page you can see some statistics

Okay, thanks. Maybe it was just because I was on the forum very late at night. I’d hate to see these forums fade away because they have been a great technical resource for me and many others for years. So I’m glad to see that, in fact, they are still thriving.

[m_hutley]

The cynic in me says “Wait until the universities in certain parts of the world get to their HTML/PHP/MySQL segments…”

(You could almost tell the time of year by the flood of the same or not-quite-the-same-but-the-same questions that popped up. You could tell which professors were just reusing the same course material.)

[Mittineague]

@OhMonty

because I was on the forum very late at night

If you think of activity as “currently logged in” then yes, some times during the day / night do tend to be quieter. One thing I find counter-intuitive is that weekends tend to be quieter than Monday through Friday. Assuming most people work weekdays, uhm, shouldn’t they be working instead of visiting a forum?

[Andres_Vaquero]

Down under is very quiet during the day normally, more quieter than it used to be unfortunately.

[OhMonty]

I thought the forums would actually be more active at night being that most tech people are nocturnal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[TechnoBear]

I think quite a few folk access the forums from work. Also, we have an international community here, so there’s really no night on the forums; your nighttime is another member’s day.

[Wolf_22]

I stopped coming here as often as I once did due to the new website, forum, application–whatever you call it now. I tried to be a cheerleader about it because I kept saying to myself, “If I just keep thinking that it’s just new, it will grow on me.”

Well, that never happened. In fact, I kind of hate it compared to the older iterations we had back in, say, 2006 or even 2004 because those were simpler to navigate, simpler to find things, plus, it had an identity you remembered after leaving the site. These new “modern” interfaces, new WYSIWYG, and the whole modern way of everything just doesn’t do it for me. It lacks spirit, man! The SP identity that this community once had was killed-off in favor of a generic-looking, mobile-friendly version of something that isn’t really a forum but also isn’t really a website, either. (But I’m sure it floats others’ boats, which is great, so all of this is just my personal opinion–not trying to make anyone angry or feel bad.)

Call me old fashioned but to me, when I get my hands dirty with something, the last thing I plan on doing is anything from my mobile phone or something that lacks a full-sized keyboard, so any mobile advantages this newest iteration of SP provides must be something that others get a lot out of. Good for them, too. If people have ways of utilizing that, more power to them.

Adding to this, I also feel that SP isn’t as diverse as it once was where topics or articles are concerned. Every time I come to the main SP page, I see things that are meant to get people to purchase stuff (which I completely understand) or else things that aren’t very interesting to me due to being topics that have been covered a billion times already. Bitcoin is one of these things–it’s a hot topic (I guess) and many people out there I guess talk about it. Thing is, I could care less about it and have no plans on ever using it unless I’m just forced to for whatever reasons. Then there’s the billionth CSS tutorial, something about JavaScript, or more stuff about SP courses or books… Back in the old days, you often saw pieces about stuff that you didn’t know much about or didn’t really see being discussed anywhere in mainstream, like 2600 kind-of-topics (black hat or otherwise) or just topics that were interesting due to being something that wasn’t mainstream…

I guess the best way I know how to describe my view of SP now is with this: if SP was a house, it would be one of the many 'burb joints you see in any other mid-sized city. Same kinds of construction, same colors, same cul-de-sac layouts. Cookie cutter all the way. Nothing horrible, but nothing very unique, either.