We reached 20000, close to the middle of the year. We can believe in the 40000 mark in one year.

Yeah, I hope this activity revitalises other forums as well. The key is coders show progress on new projects and keep interest in coding talk exchange. Basically is what happens here in Omnimaga with a complete team of coders and Cemetech mainly with Kerm works and discussion about important z80 and BASIC issues.

True, I got too much enthusiasm. Still it would be splendid we truly increased our projects progress during the summer. There is lots of time for enjoying (or gaining some extra or even necessary money) during summer.

nice. what caused the decrease, anyway?

nice. what caused the decrease, anyway?

The decrease in community activity started happening way longer before those numbers. Following the TI-84 release in 2004, many new members joined the community, especially MaxCoderz. However, the amount of good programs being released started to decline and people had the misconception that everything was accomplished for TI calcs around 2005. Activity on forums stayed up until Early 2007 but there were very few great programs being released compared to 2003 and 2004. There were also some community issues such as newbie-bashing and rivalry between some sites due to different beliefs (example: one site would promote free speech at the expense of respect, while Omnimaga would promote respect at the expense of free speech) and some people also left or lost interest due to drama. Also computers were getting more powerful, platforms like the PSP/DS more popular.

All those factors might have contributed to the decline that started in 2007. In 2008, Omnimaga shut down, which was due to problems with the community, most likely did not help, because a lot of people left, that year, too. When Omnimaga re-opened, it took until 2009 before things pick up again, slowly.

The reason why things have picked up again now, especially programming-wise, is because the misconception that everything was already done on TI calcs was finally broken. Thanks mostly to Calc84maniac with F-Zero and the like, then later, the GB emulators, key factoring then later Nspire cracking. Notice how now there are many great releases on ticalc.org compared to what we got since 2007.

Congrats guys...that is really impressive. It was cool looking at all the past numbers from all of the sites. It's a little harder for more specific groups to pull in the number you guys do and consistently. You guys are about the only TI related site/forum that I see actually improving, and improving at a good clip.

For specific sites, I think inactivity is generally caused by the lack of project updates on the forums or most staff being inactive, extended downtimes and probably some other issues (example: if a site advertises itself as promoting respect, but the staff launch bad remarks towards newbies, it doesn't really encourage every newbie to stay.)

As for Omnimaga, I will be honest, the old board userbase, in overall, was not very loyal to the Omnimaga community. Most staff and some members only posted there because I hardly posted anywhere else. I think some staff didn't even like each others and whenever the smallest misunderstood happened, some threatened to leave forever, and some did). This is why when I lost internet access in 2007 (from Feb 3rd 07 to July 5th 07), that the site became so inactive. Only a few staff were still around when I returned from my hiatus, in July 2007:



On the new site when I left for a while in May and July, the site still remained active anyway (compared to the rest of the 2009 year).

true, there aren't a lot of stuff to know about ASM concepts on z80 calcs. Learning it can be very hard, but once you learned it it,s apparently not too hard to code.

And then you got TI-BASIC, which is very slow, but still can be nice to introduce people into the programming world and can work not too bad for some games, and now Axe parser.

IMHO i wish people did not keep their misconception that everything was done back in 2005-06, tho. I am sure this is what discouraged people from trying new stuff or trying hard enough. Maybe stuff like F-Zero would have been done by then.

I also remember people would try to discourage you from doing something when you tried something new. They thought it would be impossible and stuff.

Didn't RS and MaxCoderz used to have a lot of off-topic talk, though? MaxCoderz's off-topic section is like 30% of their entire post count, from what I can see. I agree that UTI is more varied, though, as a lot of people come to ask help on anything rather than just discuss about calc projects.

Omnimaga is mostly oriented toward calc games development and always did, but now a lot of people come to ask for help and we got more variery of off-topic discussion.

Cemetech activity is increasing too it seems, altough they kinda branched out. I guess that can be a good thing, though, since it attacts people interested in other stuff but interests them towards calc stuff sometimes.

Hopefully most forums pick up again. Personally I think the high activity on Omni and Cemetech might help, though, because other forums often get advertised or linked to in posts here, so people may be tempted to go take a look.

Axe Parser is great and the interest is at high levels. It is still recent and I hope that great games will come with the contest and after the contest.

And I can't keep up too active talks like Axe Parser. I hope that we don't enter in Axe Parser only projects either.