First post, by gerry
not this one! Vogons is by far the best vintage / retro PC forum precisely because it contains none of the below signs
however many of us have in the past been members of now long gone forums, some whose ghostly forms still linger on and others whose remnants have faded away
other than forums which are simply closed down by the admins here are some signs that a still functioning forum is slowly dying, has reached that pivot point where from here on decline is almost inevitable
-a low number of new posts
-relative domination by a small number of users (with low recent post count)
-a large time gap between 'top of page' and 'bottom of page' in terms of latest post timestamp, one of the surest signs 🙁
-a relative increase in posts containing "sorry I've been away for awhile", "is this forum still alive?", sometimes accompanied by sad short duration attempts to "lets get this forum going again", the last gasps
-the lonely question - somewhere half way down the page some newcomer, mistakenly thinking it an active forum, asked an easy to answer question, yet there it remains: views 8, replies 0
I'm sure there are more, many more, signs that you have seen
behind the signs the reasons why forums finally die are simple enough - lack of interest, lack of persistence as people move on to other platforms or the topic is exhausted (so true of forums supporting a new dev tool or indy game for instance), not enough profile (sometimes if you build it they do not come) and dispersal (too many forums being set up on various angles of a given area of interest, essentially splitting up attention too much)
vogons, to revisit the above, thrives because it concentrates interest from various angles onto one overlapping forum and has 'presence' due to its long standing and wealth of posts which will show up in search engine results keeping a healthy active community with good mix of new and old. There are lots of forums in the tech world with the same positive dynamics, less so in the retro tech world