Is it me or are forums in general slow at the moment?

As in, fairly inactive?

I'm literally on every admin site going. Yet not one of them has less than a few hours between posts?

Or more than 50 a day?

And it seems like the same thing in forums in other niches. I go on a whole bunch of gaming sites, and maybe one or two at most get more than 50 or less posts a day. To the point forums with more than half a million posts seem to be nearly dead at times now.

Or I go on a forum with a few million posts and maybe ten or twenty members are online at the moment, often less.

Hell, even the biggest of the big boards seem affected, I can go on Sitepoint and somehow not get buried in new content. Or Web Hosting Talk. Or any other big board I can think of.

Is this just a slow month or something?

 

Yeah, it's admin forums... It's pretty slow in the whole hosting/admin/forum software areas.

My gaming sites are slow at the moment, but my CODForums is the one that's picking up steam since the release date is drawing closer and closer. I've seen more members sign up than ever before.

 

My forum is slow as well. I blame it on the fact that a lot of my users are in school, especially college and high school. Weekends are pretty than the weekdays though.

 

I also agree that forums are slowing down but I feel it is happening overall. This is one of the reasons I like to own blogs more than forums now. I find that forum activity rises and drops too much and it is out of control to manage. It can be really hard to cope during a slow period.

I am not sure why, maybe people have less time during school and stuff but it is a shame to not have the same activity.

 

I've seen some places that seemed to have slowed down recently, but one place I regularly post seems pretty active. I guess overall activity depends on a variety of factors.

 

I think it's just slow overall right now, too. The holiday season is coming.....Fall is always so hit or miss with traffic, depending on the niche. Forums aren't nearly as popular as they used to be anyway, so I think we can see the slowdown even more.

 

I noticed VPL has slowed down a bit too Hopefully it'll pick up.

As for admin forums, I haven't seen one that is very active, so they all seem slow to me. I think a few of them should merge or get bought out to make the niche a little less saturated.

 

Most new forums are indeed slow going. They lack active members and community and content as well, and hence it shall look like they are growing at a slow rate. But that doesnt mean that all the forums in other niches too follow a similar track. I personally am member of plenty of forums where plenty of posts are made every second. Its the members and the content that matters when we come to the growth of a forum.

 

I'm not on many admin forums so I couldn't really say if times are tough or not, but in other forums that I'm in, activity is always something that goes up and down. There's isn't really a time of the year where things are better or worse, it just varies from day to day.

 

I saw a pretty big drop in monthly posts in the second half of this year. Mainly has to do with the general quality and popularity of my niche right now. Still have about a 100 members a day but we went from 20K posts per month down to about 15K

A lot of people are back in school though, and my demo of users is much younger so that has a impact on the numbers.

 

My forum is slow right now. Everyone go over and post please!

 

It's always like this when school is in session. I'm not entirely worried about the dip because it'll pick up when users are on vacation, days off, or summer time. I'm glad we had a lot of activity during the summer because all the threads are keeping us together now, but that doesn't mean that my staff and I should stop making threads because they'll keep us going until activity picks up again. I've been pondering around another $100 posting contest but I'm not sure when to run it just yet.

This, seems like school has an effect on a lot of forum's growth, especially after the summer time. Lots of users seem to be busy on my community, some are in High school and some are in College. We have a good share of adult users too.

I'll help you out during this week as well.