I’ve noticed that the posts have trickled to a few,  ok, so there was a speed bump and ya got throwed, so get back up and post!  Please?  :D
J.

I agree. It seems odd, but the number of posts and the number of members logged in the system appear t be down for quite a bit. I’ll keep coming back and posting, but it would be interesting to know what is happening.

I think what’s happening is we have fallen below critical mass… We had a good number of people posting and visiting on a regular basis, prior to the hullabaloo of the last couple of weeks.

It’s like stoking a fire—you need to put another log on before you notice that the flame is going out, or you will have to work much harder to get the blaze to desired levels.

When we had more activity, it was pretty much self-sustaining.  I couldn’t keep up with every thread, to be honest.

But this… This is getting depressing!

Shore nuff is depressing, gittin’ kinda tired of seeing my handle on the end of every thread!
J.

What, you afraid you’re killing each thread?   ;D

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I think what’s happening is we have fallen below critical mass… We had a good number of people posting and visiting on a regular basis, prior to the hullabaloo of the last couple of weeks.
...
When we had more activity, it was pretty much self-sustaining.  I couldn’t keep up with every thread, to be honest.

But this… This is getting depressing!

Perhaps the critical mass has a maximum as well as a minimum. Certainly keeping up has been impossible during the peak.

And then add the hullabaloo, a few naff posts, and you get a fast swing to ...  depressing? Well certainly sub optimal.

Bryn

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What, you afraid you’re killing each thread?   ;D

ohno!  you think?  that’s terrible, I hope not.

I was just noticing that people weren’t adding to the threads
J.

I have no means of assessing the meaning of the ebb and flow of posts, because the Agora is the only forum in which I participate.

That said, it seems only natural that there will be periods of greater and lesser postings. People come to these forums for a variety of reasons, and other reasons take them away.

The Agora, started just six months ago, has just suffered its first stumble, and perhaps a stumble of this sort is natural and maybe even necessary. The volume of posts had risen, as others have noted, to a level where it was all but impossible to keep up with them. Too, the Agora has some 500 or even more members. What if they all participated heavily? How could anyone keep up? Being of less interest to me than other language areas, I had already pretty much abandoned the Grammar forum and posted less than I would have wished to the Suggest a Word forum.

Maybe the Agora would be a better place with fewer posts, but posts of a higher quality. That’s a proposition that’s hugely subjective, of course, but perhaps it bears consideration.

That leads me to the matter of "off-topic." I think it’s healthy and desirable for threads to meander, and I believe that some of the most interesting threads were the ones that, well, meandered and then meandered some more and never even came back to the original topic. I have, however, been put off by the volume of posts that I can only describe as idle chatter, with little or no edifying content. Hard to define? You bet. But I’d also bet that most of us knew them when we saw them.

In sum, this is our community, and the merit of its content can only reflect the effort we put into it.

Oh, yes: I still want to win the Loto so I can buy me an electronic OED.  ;)