[quote][color=gray]Is forum Roleplaying beginning to slow down?[/color][/quote]
I started role-playing on forums in 2001. I was doing it in other mediums as early as 1998.

The answer to your question is… kind of.

Forums were the new way to communicate after usergroups mostly fell out of fashion. In the era we used AOL and MSN Messenger adjacent to our interests on message boards. It was fresh. It was the golden standard and it remained as such for a good amount of time. I wouldn’t say it’s beginning to slow down. It’s [i]been[/i] slowed down as other mediums have taken the attention of younger role-players and aspiring fiction writers. Sites like RPGateway try to aspire as the middle ground from traditional forums and the new social media ways of experimenting have come to the hobby. Chat RP hubs like PJJ and mIRC have mostly switched over to Skype and Discord platforms and we are in this sort of transitional era where forum role-playing is still trying to reinvigorate itself. [b]The golden era of forum role-playing was probably 1998-2014[/b], at least by my eyes and tons of forum rp-sites are still trying to figure out the future of their communities or to keep soldiering on until everyone is done with the hobby.

Mahz doesn’t advertise role-playerguild through topsites or any sort of alternative marketing that I am aware of. Maybe that is a factor? Hard to say.

[quote][color=gray]but is there anyone else who feels that Roleplaying on forums is becoming less and less popular as time progresses? If so, do you have any theories as to why this is? My best guess is Discord, personally, as I've seen plenty of dice games, for example, switch over to it.[/color][/quote]
I don’t think it has to do with discord or skype or whatever.

As I said above, chat RPing has always been around. Most people who prefer forum role-playing don’t tend to vibe with chat RPing due to the different format. 

It probably has more to do with the hobbies and interests of creative members of the current generation. I was in elementary school when I happened upon fanfiction, role-playing forums, and interactive fiction sites. I always enjoyed writing stories so I jumped in to try to take my creative energies and use them collaboratively. My first forum was similar to our ‘Free’ section.

We have to ask ourselves where the young fanfic writers [i]are[/i] and if they are on another medium (tumblr? Google doc-based communities?).