Mind if I borrow the mic for a couple minutes?
MessengerOfDreams wrote:[...] and even as we enter 2015, people fear that the site has reached a flatline, and that we might fade out.
I don't have much experience with spearheading a true, solid community, in order to refute that appropriately, but over the 7 years in which I dediacated free time to online activities, I've taken part of several different scenarios - all of which seemed founded on a game, and thrived through restless skill crafting in gameplay and designing alike. The sequential death of four monitors and my XP desktop, in late 2010/early 2011, and the loss of all my PC games led me to join a number of new gatherings: SMG 2.5, McLeodGaming, MundoRPGMaker, Teeworlds and Runouw.com. Today, only the latter still stands, and it's for good reason.
McLeod and Teeworlds are, by far, the groundbreaking, standard-setting examples of how can a widely known game, with dozens of new dummies pouring in by the minute, turn establishing any cohesion between rookies and veterans nearly impossible, with the former's original userbase actively working on a game, and the latter setting users apart with latency and a learning curve that launches newcomers into orbit. Even the brazilian community, once at the verge of total obliteration, but almost completely unified at the time, has been replaced rapidly and, with the veterans in recess, grudges were held daily between newer users.
MundoRPGMaker probably still stands today, but only after rising from the ashes at least once. In contrast to the forum's relatively high amount of participants, few enough participated in the IRC channel before the forums being knocked down. Gradually did that group fade away as well, and due to that, even with the forum's return, I haven't been there since.
And there's the one that started it all, Mario Galaxy 2.5, home to a hypothetical "me" which had once sported a green name and a post count of well over 2'000, before the project had been moved to Kuribo. Eventually its old users vanished, grudges set the others apart faster than they could sort it out, and the project was finally taken down for good sometime last year.
All along, if you were to scroll through all that has been discussed on the course of this subforum alone... you would eventually reach the skies.
I might try and elaborate on the subject further sometime, but I feel I've taken up enough pixels for now. It's time to fly a bit higher.
El Psy Congroo.