[friendly hardline atheist]

With one of the active posters bailing out (NCAngelFire) recently, I looked at the member list, sorted by number of posts. I knew traffic was waaaaay down since 'that period' on the forum. And the numbers confirm it.

Jon is now at the top of the list with 3152. I find myself at number 17 with Commodore closing in on me. Many of the still registered heavy posters between Jon and myself are old-timers who are still members but don't post anymore.

If you then look at the bottom of each page (100 members per page) the number of posts are as follows:

100 -> 91
200 -> 36
300 -> 17
400 -> 11
500 -> 6

Then it fizzles out further. So something like 700 members have a single digit number of posts. 300 or so no posts at all, I assume these are mostly spam-bot generated members (also judging from their strange names).

So the forum appears to be in its twilight. I can't imagine that the adds generate any significant income (unless spam bots follow the link adds, giving the appearance of a busy forum to Google). Or whether that is even still a relevant consideration.

Would I be unduly pessimistic if I thought this place might not make it into 2009?

greets,
Peter