Under 50 posts/day??? Yikes!

[DJ Omnimaga]

I hope to be more active during my vacations in a week or so, but Omnimaga doesn't necessarily revolve around me, so activity doesn't always have to be 5 times my monthly postcount. I mean, in June 2012 I only had 229 posts (my lowest June activity in Omni history, excluding years of no Internet access/site being gone), yet the membership still pulled over 4700, and I'm sure at least half of it wasn't Sorunome/Blue_bear_94's spam section activity. Granted, 45 posts in 24 hours without a single spam is not this bad, but there are projects in the works, minecraft and other games as well as general calc discussions (such as contest entries) and I'M sure a few people are still around at the moment who could contribute to discussion, right? And I am shocked that there were only 47 posts considering Deep Thought's posting spree a few days ago...

I didn't say anything since it was Summer, but I started getting concerned yesterday when I noticed there were 8 hours separating two threads in the new posts section in the very middle of "rush hour", and that there were like 10-15 threads being posted in in the day. The last day under 50 posts on Omnimaga was back in February 2010, before Ndless arrived and when Axe still lacked Sprite support.

Thankfully this is Summer and ATM this month averages at 100 posts/day, which is not too bad for Summer time, but it would be a good idea to at least keep it up that way or higher, right? Because you know what happened to United-TI, MaxCoderz, Detacheds Solutions, etc. Omni and Cemetech had the same issue back in the days and recovered, but it took years and was hard. At the moment, the site, although posting quality has become far better than it was last season, is back under Axe-era activity levels.



Maybe in the future there could be some special forum rewards, even if small for those who remains active in certain forum sections (such as outside humor, now that spam was locked), have a project in the works and gain a certain amount of post "likes". I'm thinking for example about temporary Charter member position, allowing access to early staff releases to the top 10 posters in a month that had at least 100 posts outside humor/jokes/intro. That charter membership would void if the member drops under 10 posts in the last 30 days in average (like Coders of Tomorrow membership before), the month following his promotion. Another idea was giving away download codes for my music, but considering my music albums are $2-4 on Bandcamp, I'm not sure how it would make much difference.

Or maybe bring back the forum RPG? (Although that might be a problem since we no longer use Invisionfree)

Or a free alternative to taptalk and/or new mobile version of the site (replacing the crappy SMF default with no IMG tag support)

Or the other thing is me replying to 30% of the replies like back in the days, but that would be hard with my neck problems preventing me from concentrating and sitting down for too long, and being out of calc stuff getting the motivation to do it regularly would be hard. Not to mention as I said above that Omnimaga should be able to sustain itself a little, right (unlike that infamous DJ-loses-internet-access-for-five-months episode in 2007)?

[Juju]

Yeah, 50 posts/day is kinda low... What happens with you guys?

[blweldon2]

I know I am usually busier in the summer and am more active around school. I will try to bring more discussion and that will be easier with the new tapatalk integration, as I am usually away from my computer. I did notice a major slowdown on posts though.

Sent from my SGH-i937 using Board Express

[Hayleia]

Yeah, I noticed that too. I remember last year at the same period (more or less), everytime I went on Omni, even if I already came earlier the same day, there was a huge amount of new posts. It is not the same now.

Concerning myself, maybe I post a bit less because holidays is the when I have a lot of time to work on my projects, TinyCraft for example, but as you might have seen, I often make updates, sometimes double-posting.

[Stefan Bauwens]

I think a problem may be that good programmers just left.(Aichi comes to mind).
I think real life stuff may be an issue, but perhaps gaming(minecraft...)? Idk.
I personally don't play any games in general. I could't be so active lately since I'm helping painting my grandparents house(windows, doors, etc..).
But to say the truth, even if I had more time I should not try to be so much busy with calcs. I don't want to spend more than a certain time otherwise I'm spending too much time on a hobby.
Anyway, I guess there aren't so many new active projects out there. Also I believe that z80 programmers might be switching to computer/ nspire programming...
I hope activity gets better.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah if we check the stats averages per day it kinda went like this over the years. Yearly averages only spans through days of operation:

July 2005: 27/day (excluding deleted posts) - Entire year: 40/day
July 2006: 61/day (excluding deleted posts) - Entire year: 80/day
July 2007: 46/day (excluding deleted posts) - Entire year: 51/day
July 2008: Forum offline from Mar to Aug - Entire year: 21/day
July 2009: 37/day (deleted posts included) - Entire year: 41/day
July 2010: 211/day (deleted posts included) - Entire year: 239/day
July 2011: 258/day (deleted posts included) - Entire year: 316/day
July 2012: 103/day (deleted posts included) - Entire year: 180/day

As I said before, at 100 posts a day with not too much spam section activity is not too bad, but under that it gets dangerous because that leaves hours with no new posts sometimes, which makes people check less often, causing a downward spiral, making it very hard afterward to keep the site active. On top of that there are bigger risks of people asking help or showcasing their projects, only to get no response at all. On the other hand, over 400 posts/day consistently gets rather hard to keep up with. X.x

@Stefan: I definitively think Minecraft is a major issue. It reminds me of the WoW activity purge in 2005 on MaxCoderz. As for Nspire activity I think it's the opposite, though, because of what TI did with Ndless. However Nspire activity kinda rebounded lately due to OS 3.2.

[Deep Thought]

Not sure about everyone else, but for me I'm just taking a break from calc programming this summer. Too much other stuff to do.

EDIT: Heh, I still remember when ephan and others were posting >100 posts on the average day... Hectic

[jwalker]

I have been so busy for the first two months that I havnt had alot of time to do other stuff, Although I think I will get more time in about 2 weeks or so

[lkj]

I'm working on my nspire projects, but I'm just not a person who replies to every thread

[Scipi]

I really haven't been active since the computer section is always dead. Most of my attention is also being sucked up by the Ouya since I'm planning on truly breaking into game development on that console.

[Spyro543]

I don't really do any calculator development, and almost everything here is calculator-related (contests, most of the forum) and I only do computer development, I don't really do much here anymore.

[DJ Omnimaga]

We have a computer section thought, right? (if you have projects to showcase, for instance)

[Dingus]

We have a computer section thought, right? (if you have projects to showcase, for instance)

A large part of the slow down is because it is summer. In addition, with the passage of time, conditions for programmers have changed.  Prior to the release of the nspire, we were sort of in a classic period where many people including myself enjoyed the opportunity to quickly and easily program the 83/84 series calc's.  Now however with ti's continuous effort to control what can and cannot be programmed on the nspire and the limited commands available, things are not as simple and inviting as they were and I believe that is a large part of the reason for less activity here. 

We can all post more but that doesn't solve the problem which I believe is the discouragement of the restrictive programming that ti's latest calculators offer.  Some time ago, I suggested changing the emphasis on this site to the Casio Prizm but that was not well received.  I am concerned that the site will disappear from lack of use so I again suggest some emphasis on the Prizm but I am open to supporting any solution that will generate more interest in using this site.  On the other hand, encouraging people to post more doesn't solve the long term problem which I believe is a general lack of interest in nspire programming due to the difficulties and complications in dealing with nspires.   Just my opinion based on my perceptions.   

[lkj]

I believe one of the biggest disadvantages of the nspire is that on-calc programming isn't as good as on the z80 series. For Lua you have oclua, which is good but not ideal (because it was only intended to be a intermediary solution), but for C/asm there's nothing. It would be great if you could program in breaks, and not only when you have a computer with you.

[DJ Omnimaga]

A large part of the slow down is because it is summer. In addition, with the passage of time, conditions for programmers have changed.  Prior to the release of the nspire, we were sort of in a classic period where many people including myself enjoyed the opportunity to quickly and easily program the 83/84 series calc's.  Now however with ti's continuous effort to control what can and cannot be programmed on the nspire and the limited commands available, things are not as simple and inviting as they were and I believe that is a large part of the reason for less activity here.

Yeah actually the biggest slow down on Omnimaga is Nspire-related. 83+ stuff is fine, as you can see on Ticalc.org with the amount of 83+ features from late 2011 or this year for POTY 2012, but Nspire got affected the most, and since we had a lot of Nspire coders, I guess this didn't help.

Some time ago, I suggested changing the emphasis on this site to the Casio Prizm but that was not well received.

The problem with that is that since PRIZM development started, people from other calc sites have continuously been told to invite Omnimaga PRIZM coders to join other sites and certain PRIZM coders joined on their own. I wouldn't be surprised if even some site owners did the same thing too. On our side we always avoided PM or public advertising (unless that changed in recent times?) and the like unless another site was on the verge of collapse with no hope of recovery, so getting PRIZM coders that way would be impossible in our case. Because we only had two PRIZM coders of our own and both quit calc programming, this made it very hard to keep our PRIZM programmers. In addition to that, both main Casio community site have revived since the past months, so most people who temporarily migrated to Omni and Cemetech while Casio-only sites were dead have since returned to their home.

A big part of the problem for PRIZM programming is that it's considered too hard for a lot of people. Notice how on the Nspire there were far more Lua programmers than C and ASM. When Nspire dev was at its peak (before Lua arrived), there were only about 5 C coders and 1 ASM coder. On the PRIZM, all you got that is viable is C and ASM. As long as the PRIZM will lack Axe Parser, Grammer or Lua programming, it will never thrive on Omnimaga and will have difficulties having success even on a site that is mainly focusing on the PRIZM.