If you are now trying to hold down a job and raise a young family, you just don't have the time that you had at High-School & College. Also, a family is just that.....you cannot seriously expect to live the same lifestyle that you did when you were single?
Except many of the posters had full time jobs. Quad, Juridian, myself, etc. I actually stopped showing up so much after I lost my job :P

And then before that, the new staff members and Admins and Moderators, ALL got banned when they joined because that moron forgot to give them little GOLD DOTS and a bunch of people got together and Negged them all into being banned!
Now see, you should at least get the story right before you complain about JP not giving them gold dots. The ONE person that got banned this way REQUESTED that he not have gold dots. He said he didn't need them and didn't want to sperate himself or some crap (that was years ago, I don't remember his actual wording). It was at that point that I decided to ban him, and got a few people together to ban him. I think it took a total of 6 people to pull it off.


As I stated somewhere else today, the downfal of AO for a lot of people was the loss of IRC. Even though not all the members used it, the people that posted the most often were on IRC all the time. It was a natural flow between IRC and the forums.

Social networking has nothing to do with it. If I have a problem trying to fix a blue screen error, I'm not going to go on Facebook to try to fix it.

And it "used" to be, you would type in some bug or error, and AO was always one of the first few links to show up. That is how we got a lot of our members also. It wasn't because AO advertised, it was because the ammount of discussion and activity the site had pushed it up in the google and yahoo rankings.