Forums activity has gone down all the time, from my point of view the answer is simple: The kids, or the younger generation, however you want to specify the group, are more common with social media than forums. Forums used to be hot back in early 2000 but I've seen decrease in all sorts of forums since Facebook entered the internet. It's simply easier for everybody and it connects their real life and internet life together, as Sseth sort of said in other thread. If you check out our Facebook group, you'll see plenty of posts by players who've ditched forums long time ago or have never been active forum users - but on Facebook they are posting frequently! Of course, Facebook does not fit for everybody, for example I like to keep my anonymity so you most likely won't see me joining the FB group, however I am actively following what's happening there.
Forum voting is nearly pointless, rough amount of active forum users is around 12 and of those, only 6 play the game actively. That kind of figures explain a lot of how much forums seem like a remnant from the past. We've advertised the forums to newer players but most of them do not join and lets face it, even when DSB was booming, there were many of those who did not use forums, at least for posting anything, perhaps for viewing the content and then voicing themselves online or not at all. Currently we get a lot more opinions, open discussiong and players can chat in real time with us when we're on public - which seems to fit them a lot better, the answers like this I am writing at the moment would probably be skipped by half of those players who contact us on public
Development in DSB has gone downhill for a long time, short bursts of activity for development have happened but mostly we're missing a long term goals which need to be set. At the moment the development efforts have been short term focused to get something new to the public gameplay where most of our population plays on weekdays. We need more, I agree, but the problem is the resources: developers, coders, people with ideas and lots of time to produce them. The people we have in development are skilled, however they are caught irl which is the big no-no when it comes to long term projects which would mean couple sleepless nights and lots of coke (as in the drink..).
The development is tireless work, not very rewarding but very time consuming. One issue in coding can take up to many hours to fix, some simple task of adding an feature gets caught up because of wrong software versions/compatibility issues, etc. Developing also does not mean you're hitting the jackpot everytime you've worked days after days to deliver the public with a teamplay or map which you think is the coolest idea ever - the players vote, with their "feet" which are on the gas pedals of their Warbirds - they simply won't play if they don't like the theme and oops, you wasted all those days for nothing. But that is how life is, sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don't, giving up is the worst thing you can do, just get back to the drawing board and try again. Not one success in this life or the next can be achieved without many attempts and training, fine tuning and those endless hours of desperate work, tears and sweat.
Even in this game things just don't happen, somebody needs to create them, we are open to take in anybody who has skill to code bots, make maps or create uber cool themes for public (graphic designing, you know the drill if you're our guy). In short, the community needs to help us, together we can get few more years on life support or perhaps a new beginning. Alone, with everybody pointing the finger at staff who is working every day of the week with 2-4 man team to keep the daily operations running, is not getting us anywhere.
This is not simple to fix, there is not one right or wrong answer, there are many reasons why this is happening, why we are where we are today. We're trying to survive here, if somebody wants to operate or coordinate events weekends where events are hosted, by all means, do it. We, who are in staff, can give you advices on how to get it done and give you a proper training for hosting events - the rest is up to you.
Anyway, there you go, few cents from my pocket and 15 minutes of my time. Feel free to discuss or ask, I'll answer the best I can, if I can.
