New users last year

More people have registered during the last year than they have for years...
https://www.woodcentral.com/forkbb/userlist/all/registered/DESC/%2A

Most never posted, but this is not unusual. Only a very small percentage of people who register on forums actually post. Historically...
https://www.woodcentral.com/forkbb/userlist/all/num_posts/ASC/%2A

The above is skewed because there may be hundreds of thousands of posts from the old forums that could not be migrated to this software. Because the old forums could only handle several thousand active topics, they were periodically archived into zip files, and several of them from the early years were somehow corrupted and could not be read. So many of those showing zero posts may have, but there are no posts to associate with their names.

Site visits vs. Forum posts


Our site visits continue to (gradually) climb as we are now being aggressively indexed by search engines, but forum posts continue their 18-year decline -- except for a bump during the covid lockdowns. All web traffic spiked during that period.

This is not unique to WC. Forums have gradually fell out of favor over the years as people migrated to the major social networks. Is this good or bad? In some ways yes, others no. The streaming news feed formats of Facebook, Reddit, et al, are a fast way to keep up with new topics, but they lack the ability of forums to categorize and retrieve topics via search. And there is the issue that social networks often censor what you see based on algorithms.

I only present this as empirical data for your information and opinions, which I encourage you to share.