Forum Declines?

True
but at least the social sites keep these places clearer :?
but even when they DO wane, the users there, are NOT the type interested in IT in any way shape or form, so are a lost cause for our purposes

and to attract the upcoming gneration, you will need to offer them something that isn't just IT tech, it MIGHT be media / music etc, which is TBH IT Tech too, but for now, it isn't :D

and to do so 'we' WILL have to adapt to the new familiar, social sites are the way that people do utilise the www today, each day on FB they get more LOG INS than AO has had VISITS in AO's entire history
at present they [FB] are getting up to 300 MILLION users actively using their accounts daily
AO's biggest online, before the upgrade was 5000 .........
it IS a new phenomenom, and one that can no longer be ignored

I am also part of the TAZ forums, we too, would like more members, but for us, it is not too vital, as we do it just for the 'fun', any income generated would be nice ...........

but here .......... it is VITAL to AO's future as ANY type of web presence the it adapts to what we HAVE, NOT what we would like .......

and for that, I point you to my earlier post.

it may too, just finally exorcise JP's ghost from here too, as he would no longer be able to say that this was all his 'concept'

my 0.02c

[edit]
adding pic of me poor old knee, no work for a year :) but no income either :(
[/edit]

I'm not ignoring them, but I just don't get the allure of them. Especially twitter. Just an avenue to spout at the world? Who needs that?

Not only that, you can catch shameful diseases from them :eek:

http://www.antionline.com/showthread.php?t=278842

:lildevil:

:D

I didn't read the entire thread to be honest but this is a factor which might contribute to the decrease in posts which may or may not have been mentioned.

I believe that the new layout (way back when) partly contributed to the decline of AO, don't get me wrong I love the new layout (partly because I forgot how the old one looks). One feature I do remember was that we each had a tutorial count under our avatar. My number was 0 but writing a tutorial (much like the reps) gave you a sort of reputation or respect among the community and encouraged people to write more tutorials.

Many people stumbled upon AO (As I did) through Google and read information (possibly from a tutorial) that helped them. Some users registered, others just read what they needed and left. I notice that the tutorials in the tutorial forum are months apart in latest posts.

This is just my theory at least and I think this feature should return to AO in order to bring back AO to where it once was.

Possibly, but there was no choice. That version of the software had long since been abandoned by vBulletin.

Well, for what it's worth, I admin another (non-tech) forum that's also in decline relative to its golden old days. As I said in the other thread on the exact same topic (:P), forums in general. Pity though, I love this old place. I've been here since college -- It was thanks to you guys that I was able to go from a know-nothing to being able to get on my own two feet in the IT world. Seriously.

I remember Nihil mailing me copies of Win95/98 all the way over the pond for me to toy around with back when I was getting started. I STILL have them. :D

Anyway, two reasons I'm not on much: One, I don't do general IT anymore. I work at Oracle and focus on mostly one specific software program. So I no longer have my various and sundry odd issues to report here like I used to. Second, the folks I usually sought help from aren't around anymore, so usually when I do start a thread, it promptly dies. At least Nihil, Foxy, gore, and a few others are still here to bug.

All that said, a gaming section would be wonderful. Mainly because I am rusty nowadays, I'm spending time building my own custom gaming rig and learning my way through the ins and outs of the hardware (something I've never been good at). Heck, I've had a video card problem I've been fighting with over the past 6 months that would've made a great discussion topic. So if you start a gaming section, I'm all over it.

Quote:

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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?

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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

Quote:

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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!

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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.

Internet Filtering

Job Survival mode

General decline of forums to Facebook My Space etc

Outsourcing Security

Professional Pay Sites

Just ****ING Busy



Hi...

the site declined because I ceased having xmas nights out.