Hi,
no92 wrote:
We all see and at least some will agree that the version of the forum software is ancient. I thought a little bit about this and came to the following conclusion:
1. We have to move away from phpBB. It's not good enough any more.
I can still read other people's posts, and I can still create posts. In which way do you think phpBB isn't "good enough"?
no92 wrote:
2. the OSdev forums have to be a thriving community, or it will die soon.
Here's some statistics for "topics per year" (for the OS development forum alone):
March 2014 to March 2015: 804 topics
March 2013 to March 2014: 869 topics
March 2012 to March 2013: 857 topics
March 2011 to March 2012: 984 topics
March 2010 to March 2011: 905 topics
March 2009 to March 2010: 1106 topics
March 2008 to March 2009: 1513 topics
March 2007 to March 2008: 1685 topics
March 2006 to March 2007: 1435 topics
March 2005 to March 2006: 1437 topics
March 2004 to March 2005: 1412 topics
March 2003 to March 2004: 2081 topics
March 2002 to March 2003: 1767 topics
March 2002 to March 2003: 454 topics
Using this as a crude estimate, you can see that activity has dropped a tiny little bit in the last 5 years (and dropped much more significantly in the 5 years before that).
no92 wrote:
The amount of action here has noticably decayed since I joined.
I don't think it happened because you joined.
It's much more likely that the wiki has improved and people don't need to ask about as many things as before. I also think OS development has become harder due to more complicated hardware (e.g. things like UEFI and ACPI); and Windows, OSX and Linux have improved (causing less people to be dissatisfied with existing OSs); and due to a combination of these things less people are willing to write an OS.
no92 wrote:
We would have to adopt a new software, take Discourse as an example.
Switching to discourse would increase the number of posts for a short while (because of all the people complaining that discourse is crap); but after that the number of posts will significantly decrease.
Note: This is exactly what happened when The Daily WTF switched from their old forums to discourse.Cheers,
Brendan