It seems like the English z80 TI community is slowly getting centered on fewer forums again, like how it was in 2003-04, when MaxCoderz and UTI were the two only TI-83 Plus forums with considerable activity. This time, it seems like it's Omnimaga and Cemetech. For the first half of 2010, there has been almost as much posting activity in most of the English z80 community than the entire year 2009 alone, but almost 90% of it was on these two sites alone.

The graphics below shows the yearly activity of several z80 English TI forums since 2005. One shows the activity per forums, the other shows the total of all and the other shows the activity ratio between each of them. It is not 100% accurate, as it includes deleted posts, but it should still give an overview of how things evolved over the years. Click the image to show a larger, more readable view.

As you can see, most other forums still seems to be on the drop. Could this be due to inactivity from staff and admins? Hopefully, it is not too late for certain of those communities. In 2008, both Omnimaga and Cemetech were at their lowest and one year later, they lead the community. From what we could see in the last few months, TI-BASIC Developer has done a comeback, MaxCoderz got a few new active members and Revsoft has some project progress. United-TI activity has periods of higher activity and get a bunch of members, altough activity is not stable. Cemetech almost has as many posts for the first half of 2010 as they did for the entire year of 2009 and Omnimaga is getting close to its record of 30132 in 2006, only 6 months into 2010. Could this be the Doors CS and Axe Parser effect on respective sites?

Nonetheless, calculators have done a big comeback in a way. There are more featured programs on ticalc.org, although several got missed. Cemetech had its first 200+ post day since 2007 this month, which got over 2500 in total. Omnimaga got 17 days over 200 posts in June alone, 7 of which were above 300 and 2 in a row above 400. A total of 7251 posts were made on our board just in June, beating by far our April 2010 record of 5430.

The upcoming Summer activity slump looks like it will not be as bad as previous years, as several new projects were recently announced, many of which are for the two programming contests. Also, hopefully the activity of both leading forums might eventually bring some new members to other forums and in long term have a mutual effect.

And TI Bank? :p

http://ti.bank.free.fr/index.php?mod=news&ac=commentaires&id=829
 

I think it is more due to English not being focused on much in France. It seems a lot of dutch calculator programmers speak english well. What I think is that the innovations and contributions, calc dev-wise, from Critor and other TI-BANK members have helped them a lot. There is so many interesting stuff on that site.

The main reason why I did not cover the french TI forums in my graphs, though, is because in 2008, the french community did not go as inactive as the english one. They did not have to deal with trollfests like us from 2006 to 2010 in the z80 community. The graph above was mostly to show how the English community is coming back now.

Another reason is that none of the French TI forums use forum systems from which the stats can be grabbed the way I did with UTI and Cemetech. This is the reason why I did not include CalcGames either.

I hope UnitedTI gets pulled into this too, and then we'd have a complete revival

Our fears of drop of activity during summer hasn't happened for now. Instead happened the reverse.

I don't post much on UTI anymore because there is no discussion that gets me into participating. If DigiTan posts on Robot War, for example, I reply because is a damn good game. I think it is the same reason for ztrumpet and geekboy. Before there was always 3-5 topics of TI-BASIC to help others or discussing. Now there isn't one single post. And the admins and moderators are a bit absent in UTI. That is not the main cause but doesn't help. The UTI admins are not like DJ Omnimaga or Kerm Martian in terms of posting.

Cemetech on the other hand has always Kerm Martian posting and some regular members there. That always draws attentions.

2010 - 13

As for myself, I don't post on UTI much anymore because of the attitudes of some of the members.  I've only posted in The Penguin's release topic since this March.

Kerm Martian is animating Cemetech quite well.
But Omnimaga looks unstoppable now. It is really a pleasure to contribute to this forums.

Sometimes, in certain topics, I would prefer a little bit less spam and offtopic but because the spirit is nice, it is ok.
And not forgetting, I do have my moments in offtopic.