The site's posting activity has been down by a lot over the past year and especially over the past few months and I'm kinda wondering why. Is there a competitor site stealing all of the traffic? Are users really no longer interested in posting? Is it the staff? The rules? If you guys have any ideas on what you think is causing this, please let us know so that we can resolve this.

We've been averaging around 50 posts per a day for the past month now. The posting activity hasn't been that low in about 9 years. You can say it's that time of year but even this time of year we've never had nearly this low of posting traffic. Even the staff forums are completely dead.

Staff : If you guys have any idea what's going on, please inform me. We need to do something about this.

Life happened. Nuff said.

(Once everyone is finished with school by the end of June, expect the activity to go up a bit)

supercool22 : But life has been happening for the past 9 years though and that never caused the posting traffic to drop.

Well, we've gone from 12 locals to just 4, so now we have 8 less people needing to post for quota. If we add all the previous staff who have gone inactive for a variety of reasons, then we could probably blame it on the staff.

However, what I think it's happening it's the lack of new users. We've talked about this during the last TdVs, and it's a sure fact that more staff members go inactive versus the number of new posters joining. Basically, the problem is the site's own traffic and the lack of new users joining to liven up things.

We know a few issues with traffic, like the Nintendo incident, and probably said incident is also responsible for making this site less appealing to new people. If we add the people who is going inactive, both for that incident or for any other reason, the end result is a massive decline in activity.

I've been to other boards, and I have to say that I still prefer Vizzed for how it has the forums arranged and also for its summon system so users can immediately track new replies. Maybe it's because I'm used to it, but still I don't find appealing any other board I visit. They may have more forums and threads, simply because the community is bigger and/or they aren't exclusively restricted to family-friendly rules or just one language, but in my opinion it hardly makes up for the rather confusing arrangement of the forums.

Davideo7 :

I would wager a lot of it has to do with local mods and site staff stepping down as the staff+ have been making the majority of posts for quite some time now. Currently we only have 4 local mods, only 3 of which are posting actively (I will be stepping down soon). Meanwhile most of the remaining site staff are not active forum posters but mainly focus on their staff positions. Outside of that there's really only the globals+.

Forum activity for non staff members have been dropping for quite some time, few newbies stick around more than a brief period before leaving again, those who have been posting are mainly people who have been around for a while and for one reason or another are posting less either due to losing interest or simply having other priorities. I think the main problem that needs to be solved is how to give new users a reason to actually stick around the forums since that has been a problem for quite some time now, we just haven't noticed the effects until veteran users stopped posting.

This is only a depression, like the Great Depression of America, we will recover. We just have to make the site more appealing to people, or even better spread it around more. This place is severely unadvertised, the only time I saw it in someplace popular was on a video by a channel named SomeOrdinaryGamers on YouTube, and whats worse he thought it was one of those scamming sites that make you install things in order to give you viruses, or at least that's what I've gotten from it. The only reason it was so popular long ago is that you could type "play *insert Pokémon game version here* and this place is pretty much the first search result. Now that is no longer the case which severely crippled this sites traffic. We need to get this place more well known, and even then we need to make people know this place is legit, but that's just my opinion.

I have to second what EX Palen and Zlinqx said about the lack of new users. Vizzed has had members come and go over the years, but we've had a severe lack of new users joining the site. With what happened with Nintendo last year and longtime users like geeo and Jordan no longer posting but maybe a few posts a month, it's not surprising at all to see why site activity has dropped.

I really don't have a clue. I don't know why new users aren't sticking around or posting. I guess we're being overshadowed by places like Reddit, where there's a subreddit for just about anything. I get the feeling that message boards, Reddit and 4Chan not included, are more of a niche group thing than the majority of the internet like they were.

I guess the question we should be asking is "What do they have that we don't, and how can we get in on it?" Personally, I don't really care for Reddit's layout or theme and I almost never log in. I've only posted there a couple times.

EDIT: I think Boured pretty much hit the nail on the head. We're no longer unique in our market, and that's not even counting how much easier, effective and widespread offline emulation is now. We need to figure out what people are interested in now.

Boured : There is a reason for that though, besides likely being costly (when the site already has a limited budget) giving the site too much publicity especially on big sites like youtube could result in similar incidents to the Nintendo take down. The site needs to remain somewhat underground to not attract unwanted attention.

It's probably all the reasons you said, and more.

Users aren't interested in posting, because the current staff isn't giving the current userbase a reason to post. The current staff is ridiculously small, in comparison to the size of the RGR Staff.

But the biggest thing to me, is newbie retention. Look at the past few TDVs, newbies just don't participate in the TDV like they used to. Newbies are the lifeblood of the community. With no newbies, you have no new users, and you rely on the old members of the community, like myself, to provide activity, when they simply have no interest in being active.

For me, personally, I don't participate because I just don't have the time anymore, or rather, I do have the time, but it isn't worth my time anymore. I'm a Bio major in college, and the current userbase isn't really a userbase I want to get to know. There's never anybody in the sanctioned Vizzed chat, and they are all in a sketchy Discord that is invite only (I've been invited to join by several people, but I view this as an elitist thing that again, locks out newbies).

It all comes back to that, you aren't going to see a boost in activity until you get newbies to get involved. And you aren't going to get newbies involved with the current state of things, because they have no reason to get involved. Whether that's a staff thing, or a policy thing, or a Nintendo thing, or what, I don't know. What I do know is the site no longer feels as accessible to a new user.

If I wasn't an established poster, I wouldn't want to be active here, because frankly, it doesn't look like anything of value happens here, objectively. There's no great community to be involved with, it looks splintered and uninteresting. But that's just how it looks from my perspective.

I don't know how you fix it, at this point. A complete wipe would be my call, but I'm not the person calling the shots, obviously.

Looking at comments, I have to agree with most about the lack of new users. It could be that people use other methods of contact and information giving now. I don't personally look at the forums unless summoned or if asked. It might be a thing that is just part of the past. I don't know. I don't know how people feel the way they do but I can say personally I would rather post something in a discord channel for someone to read than navigate a forum.

If it doesn't pick up by end of June then something may be terribly wrong. Summer break should be starting this week for most kids in America. We can't force people to post but if there is good enough discussions going on then that might assist in increasing posts.

Maybe you should run a general chat poll and see why people are not posting that may give a better idea to the question. Another idea is maybe run competitions for the forum instead of just doing them for the RGR. Not necessarily TDV but similar to the RGR ones where people can win prizes by posting.

I have noticed that too. They was a site that had the potential to be a rival to this one. But last time I had checked on that site it had been shut down. 

Speaking of shutting down. I have noticed ever since a certain gaming company told sites such as this to remove their licensed games traffic on this site has been way down. It is like a lot of posters that used to post regularly left after that. I hated to see that cause it was not vizzed's fault or anything like that. 

Second, I think a lot of people especially people under the age of 18 have been in school. For most locations in the USA school is coming to an end so maybe we will see an uptick in activity. 

Anyway, these have been my own observations 

I kind of agree with JigSaw. A lot of the lower ranks don't actively take part in TDV mostly out of disinterest, but I imagine that there's a decent amount of users who feel totally disadvantaged as a result of their rank. I realize we have checks in place to prevent abuse, but we need to either buff the lower ranks or nerf the higher ones. I also think that further incentivizing a lesser post competition, something maybe more along the lines of the old VCS, which I don't know much about but read a few things, could help a little.

If it's popularity then I'll try my best to spread this site to anyone else I know! But... I guess I just don't really know what to post about, I'm open to ideas and will work on making threads for all of them! (Guess it's just my way of saying thanks, XD)

New user retention. I think that is the biggest problem. We had regular new users for years but in the last 2-3 years it seems to have dropped off a lot.

Coincide with that the drastic increase of phone usage over desktop/laptop usage and you have a site that isn't going to get many new people joining.

I don't know about other people, but I haven't been too active outside of replies and my own threads mostly due to a lack of interest and replies. 
I was never really into the RGR, outside of the few games I initally signed up for the site for. 

I think the board has slowly been dying not just because of the Nintendo Incident (whether it was my fault or not, which I still don't think it was), and the lack of a niche. I mean, I personally think that in order to be successful, not to the point of self sustaining, but to make a livable income off of, there needs to be more other than old video games that just the occasional geek besides myself looks to play. 
I think if you actually put time into the Arena, and maybe made this a Retro Streaming Hub (if you can understand what I mean by that), then activity might come up a little. 

I honestly don't know what to suggest. I've never been good at helping myself, but I've been good with helping others. And it crushes me to not be able to help you. 

I am determined more than anything in a solution I have to help Vizzed, but I need your permission first Davideo7!! 

@geeogree I understand.  Wouldn't it be cool if, somehow, there were a way to play games from this site on your phone?  If there were, I'd totally give it a shot!