Blame Streetwalrus parents

Although more CoT staff updates and more active ones would probably have helped since forums tend to keep their activity levels higher when the main team is engaged, not to mention Omnimaga often relied on staff and major community projects to stir activity. There are perhaps other things that could help the activity increase, although they might be harder, if not impossible, to change.


But yeah people can't claim that Omni activity levels are normal at this time of the year like I heard before. From what I notice, the main issue seems to be weekends, though. But of course we also lost the TI-Planet partnership so a massive part of the TI-Nspire discussion has moved to TI-Planet, plus some Nspire devs prefer to keep progress on their projects hidden now, in fear that TI uses it to block Ndless.

Of course keep in mind that quality>quantity though. I mean, it's fine if your posts aren't necessarily that long and if you just give feedback/suggestions on projects and stuff, but I still remember those quote pyramids in June and when you would ask questions in response to a post before even reading it

It's ok, everyone gotta start somewhere after all. But yeah I'm just making sure that people don't post more just for the sake of posting more and instead, keep their posting quality at the same level regardless of if they post more or not. And of course people who only try to rack up their post count with 1-word posts, although since people normally do this to reach the first rank, then this isn't a  big problem on Omnimaga

On the other hand, getting to 400K posts before 2015 would be nice (even though it looks impossible without a massive influx of new members and projects)


EDIT: I'm still curious about how many posts a month Omnimaga had from 2005 to 2012 but without including spam posts.

Oh I meant monthly stats without including spam. It varies from month to month and year to year because I remember during Summer 2007 or so, at one point in the daily active topics section, there were usually 2 or 3 posts in a random calculator thread and 30 posts in the Count to 8000 thread, so I was curious about which months were particularly spammy and which one had more constructive content.

And yeah the stats are better than in 2005 and even 2007 in some cases, although many 2005-06 posts have been deleted since then. In October 2005, for example, there used to be 1082 posts, but only 692 of those remains.


Basically what I was getting at is that we can compare stats how we want, but if, for example, in September 2006 80% of the posts were made in the spam section, then maybe 2014 isn't all that bad after all. And we all know about that one Jan 1st 2007 600+ post days

@Alberthrocks: Keep in mind about the following (some of which I stated above):
-New members stats from 2012 to 2013 were inflated by spambots. Sometimes there were like 200 spambots signing up each day.
-2006-12 stats are greatly inflated by the spam forum. Sure, activity went down since 2011, but it's August 2012 onwards that should be more relevant because in 2006-07 there were sometimes more spam posts than quality content.
-A massive amount of 2005 posts have been deleted over the years due to duplicates and stuff. 2006 had a lot of deleted stuff as well since back then, any post that broke the rule or drama topics would get deleted, not to mention the entire links section which had 300+ topics.
-In 2010-11, we had the Axe and Ndless craze. The Ndless craze ended abruptly when OS 3.0.x pretty much alienated everyone.
-In late 2012-early 2013 we got the 84+CSE craze, although it was far smaller than Axe/Ndless.

I could maybe try something else, though *calls Archive.org to the rescue*, but even then the good post vs spammy content ratio fluctuated a lot depending of the period of the year so it wouldn't be that accurate.


EDIT:
May 12th 2005 to April 9th 2006:
-17092 posts (approximately 4093 spam posts, meaning under 12999 constructive posts)


April 10th 2006 to March 29th 2007:
-25712 (6813 spam, meaning 18899 real posts)

March 30th 2007 to Jan 1st 2008:
-12509 (1856 spam with the spam section closed for a part of the summer, meaning 10653 posts)


Some smaller data:
From April 10th 2006 to May 17th:
-4619 posts (602 in spam, meaning 4017 useful posts)

May 17th to June 13th 2006:
-2022 posts (740 in spam, meaning only 1282 useful posts)

June 14th 2006 to October 10th 2006:
-6841 posts (1732 in spam, meaning 5109 useful posts)

I can't check for the new board because the spam section has been invisible to guests since 2008.

@Eeems to me the critical mark is under 1000 posts a month during school months, perhaps 800 during Summer. Under that when people come back from bed, school or work, sometimes there's not even a single new post and people start visiting less often. Under that is pretty hard to recover from, especially when 0-post days (which are next to impossible to recover from) start happening.


Besides, under 1000 posts a month means my music albums costs $6 (they're $5 when we have from 1000 to 2499 posts and $4 when we have from 2500 to 4999. And they're even free if the site ever hits 12500 again!)

Yeah I think it's more next Fall that might be a problem. But of course in order to happen this requires the loss or massive drop in activity from at least 1 very active member or multiple of the most active ones. The opposite can happen when old users come back and are very active, but past experience told me that when old members come back, then their stay is usually short-lived (usually under a month)



EDIT: Monitoring the post bot daily to see if it's working (eg not be dependent on me reporting the issue every week) and doing the same with the channel linker bot (to relay messages from EFnet to Omninet or vice-versa) would also help.

On the other hand, I would suggest to at least make sure your grades stay up. I mean it's one thing to be super active here, but as long as it doesn't hurt your grades either (well, if you live somewhere where it's OK to get 80% score and you drop from 95 to 90 I guess it's fine but you get the idea). That said, I noticed that I am much less active during vacations than when I have work (probably because I have time to go out more and stuff).


Also Omni really needs to find a way to keep non-calc programmers around. We have computer projects section and Minecraft sub-forums to showcase creations, yet only XiiDraco and The King uses them respectively.