This month, maybe "Omnimaga: The Coders Of Tomorrow" should have been renamed "Omnimaga: The Land Of Ninjas".

Ninjas has effectively invaded our forums since March 2010 began, but in forum posting form rather than human form. Since the middle of fall, it has become more and more common, during active hours, to be Ninja'ed when posting on Omnimaga forums, which basically means posting a new reply to a topic only to find out that someone else has posted the same thing seconds earlier, and it has become even more common to see multiple replies to a message almost at the same time (commonly mis-referred to as cross-posting). Fortunately, SMF forum system has a features that warns our members that new replies were made to the topic they were replying to, if there are any, allowing them to edit their post accordingly, preventing potentially important messages from being missed and disrupting the flow of the conversation. In March 2010, however, new replies while posting has been legion to the point where at certain times of the day (usually during evening on week days) you may get notified about them twice during a single post.

After setting a new activity record for a February month with 2614 messages (the previous record was 2502, in 2006), we just have done the same in March. So far, 2893 posts were made this month, beating March 2006 record of 2703 with still 13 days to go. The highest activity on record on Omnimaga so far is April 2006, with 4045 messages, which was helped a lot by the high popularity of the Randomness sub-forum at the time, a section that had close to 20% of the entire old board activity.

Earlier in March, the new Omnimaga forums also witnessed its first day with over 200 posts, on March 5th, with a total of 241. 3 more days in the 200s were recorded afterward, specifically March 7th (232), 9th (228) and yesterday the 18th (250). While we are still far from our streak of five 200+ days in a row (Jan 7th through 11th 2006), this is still a huge increase over last month so far, especially that we only saw 3 days under 100 posts in march, as for tonight. Yesterday, we also received our highest amount of forum traffic, with 21162 hits only on the board pages, beating by far March 6th record of 11952. In fact, we do not know if it is because of the unusual traffic load, but last evening we even got hit by server errors, which fortunately went away with a few quick page reloads. After a traffic decrease in February, it seems like we are gonna know a major increase once again.

Many factors might explain the huge increase in activity in the past months, such as several of our members who stayed around or came back after Summer ended, add to that a lot of registrations in May and June last year. That, combined with the arrival of some very active members (and staff) in November, the friendly environment, the many active projects and major releases such as the GBC emulator for the recently jailbreaked TI-Nspire, most likely contributed a lot in attracting new members and keeping most regular arounds.

It also seems that our activity is still remaining concentrated toward calculator development too. While music showcase has become slightly more popular and that more people asks calculator help, 11276 messages out of our 25919, which is 43.5% of this entire SMF board, are located in calculator projects sections.

And both our staff and regular members are in for more releases too!

Very nice!  I have fallen victim to several sneaky ninjas as well.

rolling.

and rickrolling

But... but... could this last one be the main cause of our activity increase??

I was surprised activity increased this much, though. My biggest surprise really was December. I expected November to be very active, because the years before, Nov was usually active. In 2007, Zera came out with Lost Legends series for example and a few other members like {AP} I think joined. Nov 08 also had higher activity than other months at the time, so based on 2009 fall activity I expected an increase. However, Christmas time is normally really dead around here, yet, we still had lot of people coming. When I saw Dec I guessed Jan would be quite active too. I was really surprised at the difference, though.

From experience, general TI forums generally goes through an activity slump for most of the Winter season, then things pick up again as spring progresses until the middle of the Summer, where activity drops until next school year is about to start. During Summer, some people normally leaves for vacation with no internet access and some even lose interest. When school is about to restart, new calc users comes to get games and ask questions. Some of these people stay around if they're interested in learning more, whenever they're not too busy with school.

However, I noticed that Omnimaga often tends to get most of its activity during Winter and lasts until Summer. The school restart rush is generally much shorter so activity generally remains low until November the year after.

This Winter, UTI forums has been slightly more active than the year before in Jan and Feb, I think, but for some reasons, activity dropped a lot in the past few days. TI|BD activity seems to be rather similar to what it was before. Cemetech got through a major spike in Jan and parts of February, but then it slowed down and they barely have any calc talk anymore. As for TI-Freakware, it somewhat came back to life, sort of, with AaroneusTheGreat return, and Revsoft is still active, altough all their projects are mostly progressing behind the scenes (I guess they want to keep some surprises or something)

Wow, this is a fantastic milestone, not to mention a great sign of the healthiness of the community With so many new projects, and a  whole new area opening up with the nSpire hacked the community is booming!

ouch its great to see we broke these records though like galandros said look at the community go were still here baby

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I noticed the server errors last night and went "Oh boy, didn't DJ say something about the server crashing one time in a time of high activity..."

Well I mentionned about the errors on IRC but they went away quickly. usually, I clicked, got 500 Internal server error, immediately refreshed the page, then it loaded fine. It was random. This happened before but not that much in a short amount of time. Occasionally you'll run into such error then it goes away.

That's what happened to me too.

lol, nice location Geekboy...

I don't think rickrolling is a record for this month. (nothing that can't be arranged, though, but it would be a little unpleasant to do)
Yay DJ Omnimaga has 6k posts!

The spring break hasn't arrived and I am affected in activity... But I will leave completely for 1 week or maybe 2. I have lots of activities (never had so much I think), exams, going out with friends, travels, etc..