i have been on this forum since 2017
i have seen multiple up and down activity cycles
i am convinced there is no magic bullet
most forums die, and usually stay dead, this one died a couple times and was revived, sometimes thanks to strategic decisions i made.
for example: when i allowed btt users to teleport, there was a huge disagreement in the forum, and it lingered a long time, but it did pay off with reviving the forum from death.
sometimes thanks to huge efforts done by our forum team (i specially point to mbah) who brought bounties and convinced bounty managers to launch here.
In general we are always at the mercy of some project giving money for users to be active.
My bet is to reach some of these 600 million users, and hopefully we'll have new blood joining, users that would stick around when bounties dry up.
I am open to feedback and criticism, but trust me on this one.
design issues, sure can be and will be improved: slower, other color sets
other forum modification are required and should be a priority . Yes i agree, but the difference between implementing a simple rss feed fetcher that does not interact and influence existing code, and implementing a system that require modifying existing code and database is big.
scroller took me a weekend to make it work properly, then 4-5 days to actually get it to work on the site.
For the simplest of the requested features, i will have to block a month, and might not even work.