That's what I used.

But wasn't that just 'cause your floormate's webcam wasn't working?

Hey nice to see you are still around

Indeed, nice change since 2008 and early 2009. Now it's more centered on two forums and less on many but the total activity has increased considerably.

Yeah .

The issue that happened is that usually, an active forum saw its staff leave over the time, but nothing was done to replace them and to monitor their activity. When those teams had no more active projects, the site slowly died. Other things that happened were people being hostile to newbies and groups of people and if the site was advertised as a nice site (eg: a board rule saying you must be respectful to others), newbies did not see it coming. There were also some fights, but when they got solved, things went fine again afterward. Not to mention some years there were way too many small forums starting up and the offer became too high for the demand. The fate of the TI community seems to have caused Omni and Cemetech to be the current two major english TI forums. THis is quite weird considering both sites went through chaos in late 2007 and early 2008.

Check the image attached to this post to see how much the TI community activity shifted from a place to another in the past 6 years.

For TI-FW and RS, the issue was that both had similarities with United-TI/Omnimaga and MaxCoderz respectively during their peak periods. TI-FW was mostly TI-83+ BASIC and 68K C while UTI was TI-83+ BASIC and Omnimaga was both TI-83+ BASIC and 68K C. Revsoft was almost MaxCoderz, but with different staff/users. What they offered in overall was the same kind of stuff MaxCoderz offered: z80 assembly stuff. Since UTI/Omni/MC had high activity already, it was very hard at the time for RS/TIFW to compete in terms of activity. The result: as soon as staff went inactive, most people stopped posting. Omni faced a similar problem in 2006-07, as most of our members were UTI members already, so when I went inactive, most people went inactive too.

As for MaxCoderz, it was a combination of factors that caused its death. First, they moved to a new domain name in 2006 but never announced the change anywhere. Additionally, they decided to remove their download section, which was basically their history since 2001. As a result, they lost most of their users during the move. In fact, in 2009 I still heard people saying they thought MaxCoderz was gone since 2006 whenever I showed them the new URL. In addition to that, there wasn't much staff renewal over the last few years so no one could replace the retiring staff. As a result, fewer projects were active and then members stopped posting. Finally, in early 2008 Kv83 did something to me that pissed off a lot of Omnimaga and United-TI members and even one of the MaxCoderz admin, in response to Omnimaga demise announcment there. As a result to this, most of those people stopped posting altogether. This is why you see such an abrupt decrease percentage from 2007 to 2008. Near the end of 2007, MaxCoderz was doing kinda fine then suddently no more activity.

As for United-TI, the removal of their downloads section and the decreasing activity from many staff and projects did not help them much in the past 2 years. In TI-BD case, they had a similar staff issue. Also, some things happened (mostly hostility towards newbies) that some of their most active members lost patience on and decided to migrate to Omnimaga, combined with some UTI members just leaving the community altogether.

Revsoft faced staff inactivity and hostility issues (caused by only one member) which were not dealt with, which they seem to have an hard time recovering from. One member that was active left their site, but I do not know if it's the reason why he left. He joined Omnimaga one year later. Not only that, but in April-May 2010, their site went down completly for several weeks.

Detacheds had some staff inactivity and their board slowly died. Same for OTBP, EPS and ticalcs.net. I was EPS staff, btw.

As for the smaller forums, they were just more offer than the community demand. There were too many TI forums at the time for new ones to start up.

Cemetech have some trolling issues with a few members and used to be hostile back in the days, but their board rules warns that Cemetech is not responsible and indicates that it might happen. Basically, if someone dislike that, he just doesn't signup, else, he joins and stay. You know what you're up to when you go there, plus it's not like such issues happens as much anymore nowadays anyway: You just avoid the Politic/rant/Freebuild sections and the video cards/browsers/OSes topics and make sure to not have terrible grammar and then good luck finding a bad comment. This is why I still post there nowadays (every two weekend). That, combined with the dedication of some of their admins, especially Kerm, plus the renewed open mindedness towards TI-BASIC, has contributed to Cemetech managing to recover from the Jatol hosting incident in late 2007 and to break new activity records recently.

As for Omni, despite our high activity back in the days, the anti-hostility rules caused us to have a lot of haters in the past, because they claimed that banning troublemakers was censorship/dictatorship. In late 2007 it reached such extent that caused the staff to join them to a certain level, leading to a certain Omni demise. After things calmed down in the community, 6 months later, the site restarted from scratch. After growing at a slow pace for one year, the renewed project base, especially the GB emulators, the open mindedness towards lib usage in TI-BASIC (now also present on Cemetech as well), the lower hostility guarantee, Axe Parser and the large amount of news about the TI-Nspire has contributed a lot to the revival of the site, not to mention that a bunch of UTI and TI-BD members migrated here due to problems mentionned earlier. One Cemetech member also migrated, but Cemetech went fine again afterward so now he is active on both sites. Eventually, we managed to break activity records as well, even thought one year ago we thought we would never have more than 2500 posts a month again.

There was an era where most remaining calc sites tried to find ways to branch out from TI stuff. At one point, it became apparent that a TI website would never survive only with calc stuff. This is why we expanded the off-topic sections to anime, rom hacking, web dev and gaming. Cemetech expanded to more LEGO stuff, hardware discussions and projects and computer development. On Omni, branching out kinda failed, though. This is not much an issue anymore today due to the renewed interest towards calc stuff.

Of course that might depend a bit of point of views, some people might have different opinions on why sites died, but I have seen many things and how they went since 2001.

Nice, I'll check the new account soon

I cannot participate to the show tomorrow, though, because I won't be home between 4 and 10:30 PM.

14 minutes!
I'll be there again.

Who's Merth?

Merthsoft: http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=profile;u=828

Is it possible to put the link to the site on the first post? Every time I have to search for it on Z's post.