You know what you don't see on any admin forum?
Users signing up and asking how to do things. It's rare for a new person to join and ask how to create a style for "insert software name here". Not only that. How many users on your forum use other software besides xenforo? Sure I see the rare Jcink forum owner or phpbb owner. For the most parts it's all xenforo.
Xenforo has the greatest diaspora of casual hobbyist forum owners. Jcink forum owners are probably posting their support on Jcink; phpBB owners are posting their support questions on phpBB, etc.
Xenforo users, on the other hand, are widespread. As long as folks like Shawn and Cedric and yourself keep posting and the flame lit, that's the most that we can do.
One of the existential questions I ask myself is how many new conversations can we actually have about forums? Like, after fifteen years of discussing forums, how much more can we talk about dark mode or tags or "that time when a user backstabbed you"? I also wonder how open legacy forum admins are to actual community management, which is ... hard, and takes work, and involves strategy. Or if we just want to pop open our gaming site and install a pretty theme.
Can’t argue there. They were indeed more serious forums, where we on InvisionFree were considered not so serious. Still, we had the same amount of users, activity and traffic. But more with a free roaming audience.
I'm always astounded at the "pockets" of people in each software or platform and how popular each platform was on their own.
I was involved with SMF and Google Groups and Yahoo Groups in their heyday, and they had millions of users. If you add other platforms like phoBB, myBB, InvisionFree, Jcink and others, the totality of the entire forum audience was astounding in their heyday.
