20000 posts in a year on an english TI forum for the first time since 2007

[DJ Omnimaga]

For 2010, Omnimaga forums has broke the 20000 posts bar, making it the first time since 2007 that an English TI calculator forum reaches at least 20000 posts in one single year! The image below lists the yearly stats for every forum that ever had at least one year in the five digits, as well as a few other boards, since the year 2005:

After reaching a peak of posting activity in 2006, TI-Z80 community dwindled afterward, reaching a bottom low in 2008 (the year where Omnimaga was gone for almost half a year), where Ticalc.org POTY only had two entries in total. Afterward, activity in overall started to increase again, programming-wise too, altough only a few forums picked up again (including Omnimaga). However, even on the forums that did not see their activity increase yet in 2010, there seems to be new members arriving as well as former ones showing up again, especially lately, even on MaxCoderz. Revsoft, despite just having come back from a one month downtime, has some activity on the forums. As for Cemetech, it seems like that they might have chances to break the 20000 bar this year, too. Omnimaga, on its side, just shattered 4 monthly activity records in a row, all of which were originally set in 2006. As for Ticalc.org, 2010 already have 10 featured programs, while in 2009, only 4 programs were POTY candidates at this time of the year. In May 2010, their website also saw the first monthly traffic increase (over the same month of the previous year) for the first time since April 2008.

In long terms, the skyrocketing activity on both Cemetech and Omnimaga forums and the recent invasion of new great programs on ticalc.org could possibly benefit for other sites, too, providing their respective owners are still active. Will we eventually see POTY polls with over 10 choices once again?

[Galandros]

We reached 20000, close to the middle of the year. We can believe in the 40000 mark in one year.

Yeah, I hope this activity revitalises other forums as well. The key is coders show progress on new projects and keep interest in coding talk exchange. Basically is what happens here in Omnimaga with a complete team of coders and Cemetech mainly with Kerm works and discussion about important z80 and BASIC issues.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Keep in mind there is still Summer, though, which is usually the most inactive time of the year on Omnimaga. In 2006, about 52% of the entire board activity is during the first 5 months of that year and some summers+fall are much worse than others (see for example, the amount of features on ticalc.org from July 2001 until March 2002). We have very large chances to hit 30000, though.

[Galandros]

True, I got too much enthusiasm. Still it would be splendid we truly increased our projects progress during the summer. There is lots of time for enjoying (or gaining some extra or even necessary money) during summer.

[DJ Omnimaga]

True. Also if this summer was very active, it could encourage newbies to join more on new school year and make the older people come back.

[calcdude84se]

nice. what caused the decrease, anyway?

[Madskillz]

Congrats guys...that is really impressive. It was cool looking at all the past numbers from all of the sites. It's a little harder for more specific groups to pull in the number you guys do and consistently. You guys are about the only TI related site/forum that I see actually improving, and improving at a good clip.

[DJ Omnimaga]

nice. what caused the decrease, anyway?

The decrease in community activity started happening way longer before those numbers. Following the TI-84 release in 2004, many new members joined the community, especially MaxCoderz. However, the amount of good programs being released started to decline and people had the misconception that everything was accomplished for TI calcs around 2005. Activity on forums stayed up until Early 2007 but there were very few great programs being released compared to 2003 and 2004. There were also some community issues such as newbie-bashing and rivalry between some sites due to different beliefs (example: one site would promote free speech at the expense of respect, while Omnimaga would promote respect at the expense of free speech) and some people also left or lost interest due to drama. Also computers were getting more powerful, platforms like the PSP/DS more popular.

All those factors might have contributed to the decline that started in 2007. In 2008, Omnimaga shut down, which was due to problems with the community, most likely did not help, because a lot of people left, that year, too. When Omnimaga re-opened, it took until 2009 before things pick up again, slowly.

The reason why things have picked up again now, especially programming-wise, is because the misconception that everything was already done on TI calcs was finally broken. Thanks mostly to Calc84maniac with F-Zero and the like, then later, the GB emulators, key factoring then later Nspire cracking. Notice how now there are many great releases on ticalc.org compared to what we got since 2007.

Congrats guys...that is really impressive. It was cool looking at all the past numbers from all of the sites. It's a little harder for more specific groups to pull in the number you guys do and consistently. You guys are about the only TI related site/forum that I see actually improving, and improving at a good clip.

For specific sites, I think inactivity is generally caused by the lack of project updates on the forums or most staff being inactive, extended downtimes and probably some other issues (example: if a site advertises itself as promoting respect, but the staff launch bad remarks towards newbies, it doesn't really encourage every newbie to stay.)

As for Omnimaga, I will be honest, the old board userbase, in overall, was not very loyal to the Omnimaga community. Most staff and some members only posted there because I hardly posted anywhere else. I think some staff didn't even like each others and whenever the smallest misunderstood happened, some threatened to leave forever, and some did). This is why when I lost internet access in 2007 (from Feb 3rd 07 to July 5th 07), that the site became so inactive. Only a few staff were still around when I returned from my hiatus, in July 2007:



On the new site when I left for a while in May and July, the site still remained active anyway (compared to the rest of the 2009 year).

[calcdude84se]

Nice to know. thanks for the info.
Goodness, if it weren't for the existent of a large niche market (kind of an oxymoron, but whatever) for calcs, they (and we) would be gone... Calcs are nice because assembly is, compared to most other systems, rather easy.

[DJ Omnimaga]

true, there aren't a lot of stuff to know about ASM concepts on z80 calcs. Learning it can be very hard, but once you learned it it,s apparently not too hard to code.

And then you got TI-BASIC, which is very slow, but still can be nice to introduce people into the programming world and can work not too bad for some games, and now Axe parser.

IMHO i wish people did not keep their misconception that everything was done back in 2005-06, tho. I am sure this is what discouraged people from trying new stuff or trying hard enough. Maybe stuff like F-Zero would have been done by then.

I also remember people would try to discourage you from doing something when you tried something new. They thought it would be impossible and stuff.

[Madskillz]

The problem with forums like RevSoft and Maxcoderz is that we are both pretty specific. Let's be honest you come for the projects and that is about it. We generally dont post about what is going on outside of our own little sites. We sometimes post stuff, but it is pretty RS specific or MC specific. Unlike places like UTI or here were you have a wide variety of groups coming together and discussing, all sorts of different areas of the calcs/community. Which is great, I think that is really important and it's good that everybody is so accommodating. I think there are a lot of stuff coming from all around in the future that is going to be pretty impressive. I see a bright future ahead with a lot of cool projects to get excited about, some we havent seen yet and some in the works for a long time finally getting closer to see the light of day.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Didn't RS and MaxCoderz used to have a lot of off-topic talk, though? MaxCoderz's off-topic section is like 30% of their entire post count, from what I can see. I agree that UTI is more varied, though, as a lot of people come to ask help on anything rather than just discuss about calc projects.

Omnimaga is mostly oriented toward calc games development and always did, but now a lot of people come to ask for help and we got more variery of off-topic discussion.

Cemetech activity is increasing too it seems, altough they kinda branched out. I guess that can be a good thing, though, since it attacts people interested in other stuff but interests them towards calc stuff sometimes.

Hopefully most forums pick up again. Personally I think the high activity on Omni and Cemetech might help, though, because other forums often get advertised or linked to in posts here, so people may be tempted to go take a look.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Btw Axe Parser-related discussion on the forums (including news exclusive to Axe and projects) average at 1.586952959 posts per hour. This is an average of 38.086871 per day! If we separate all Axe discussion from Omnimaga forums and put it alone, it ranks 3rd in activity among all forums, behind Omnimaga itself and Cemetech. I don't think it matches the activity of every other english forum combined anymore, though, because United-TI recently started to pick up again with new members coming for help and projects resuming and TI-BASIC Developper activity skyrocketed since the past week (with a lot of new members), but it's still rather high for just one single calculator theme.

This means Axe Parser related monthly posting activity has broken the thousand posts bar, with an average of 1158.47566 a month. About two months ago, it was in the 700s.

Because the monthly average board post count in total since Feb 2010 is 4561.871824 a month (one post every 6 minutes ), this means that 25.39% of the entire board discussion since then has been Axe Parser-related

I guess congrats to Quigibo for making this language so easy to learn for BASIC programmers and very convenient to use at the same time

[Galandros]

Axe Parser is great and the interest is at high levels. It is still recent and I hope that great games will come with the contest and after the contest.

And I can't keep up too active talks like Axe Parser. I hope that we don't enter in Axe Parser only projects either.

[DJ Omnimaga]

I doubt the later. There will probably always be a bunch of BASIC and ASM programmers around, plus we got the TI-Nspire talk that could eventually pick up, when Ndless 2.0 comes out.