There seems to be more people on the forum of late, at least in terms of people appearing online. I was wondering if this is the case or not? There also appears to be more people posting, and I was wondering if this was correct as well?

I haven't run the numbers recently so I am now.

Item	Last 7 days	last 30 days	last 360 days
Activity	346	622	3002
Posted	93	146	404
new	35	125	560
new & active	1	118	391
new & posted	1	1	37

Of the active 346 this week, 285 registered more than 1 year ago, 133 more than 10 years ago.
Of the 93 posters this week, 87 registered more than 1 year ago, and only 44 more than 10 years ago.
We have a huge lurker population.
These do not include users who declined admin email.

Thank you for the update, Aramis. We need to work harder at getting the new members to join in the posting.

Does anyone have any ideas on how we, as a forum, might to that?

This is just a feeling that I have, but I was wondering if anyone else had the same feeling.

There seems to be more members visiting the Forum that have either never posted or who have posted very little. Not posting a lot I can understand, but being a member for several years and never posting puzzles me. Is there any way that we could encourage some of the long time members to join in the conversation, as I am positively certain that they would have valuable comments and information to impart"

Quite a few come to use the various non-post features- files, images.

You have to be a member to read anything of substance here. Non-members have very little access. So, this inflates membership numbers beyond those actually interested in participating.

I believe there is some true to this. I know of people who like to access forums like this one for ideas and material for their games, and are not at all interested in interacting with an online community.

For years I was one of them.

with Google+ closing down that could possibly bring in new membership that does want to actually discuss things. However, I really don't see that happening as most will either transition to one of the FB groups or yet another social platform.

I was a lurker for the longest time, primarily as I had not actually played in years when I joined, and felt I had nothing worthwhile to add. Obviously I've gotten over my shyness and occasionally manage to say or contribute a bit the conversation that may be useful. But a lot of people prefer a more passive experience for these things.

And has :xh: this been here long - for some reason I just noticed it (we do need a squirrel emoticon as I get easily distracted and, hey, look, something shiny!)

:squirrel: seems broken at the moment. But explosive head is new...
Edit: squirrel is only broken in the menu.

Based on these two members, it looks like I need to be patient. Both are valued contributors to the Forum, and I appreciate their comments highly.