CoasterBuzz quietly hit a milestone of sorts last week. The 50,000th topic was started. I say quietly because I've never been that eager to focus on quantity over quality when it comes to quasi-anonymous voices talking about stuff. Well, I did in the early days, and I quickly learned that no amount of page views were worth it if it was all noise.
The forum stats are as weird as ever, because the number of people who participate is about the same as it has been for probably a decade. What's weird is that overall traffic is up pretty significantly this year, but the number of people actually contributing to discussions has been pretty flat. Not saying that's good or bad, just now what I would expect. It's probably better that way, after a summer of community shakeouts that put the smack down on a couple of people who were trying to hard to be the life of the party.
If you told me then years ago that the site would still be around today, I'd be skeptical. Heck, in 2011 I was wondering if people were losing interest. Then late last year things started perking up, and this year has been even better. It's a really fickle audience that kind of engages and drops off in a cyclical fashion, not entirely unlike the way my interest varies. (Though it's not as fickle as the Cedar Point fan audience... the moment GateKeeper opened it seemed people had already moved on.)
Closing in on 14 years, I'm not sure what I'll do next with it. I'm hesitant to mess with it too much, because the SEO is really solid, and the "metro" look is even more trendy now that iOS is doing it. (Seriously, even SuicideGirls recently went metro.) I have some ideas, but honestly, if I can squeeze out any free time to work on this stuff, it's going to be to work on our quilt site (which I'm taking a break from to write this blog post).
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