First things first, excuse me for clickbait title. This is not another one of the myriad of topics complaining about how Casual has become advanced, or anything like this. However, the title still applies and you'll see why in a moment.

A little bit of background info, first:
Recently, I began to take programing as hobby and try to get the hang of my favorite language so far (Python). As of the moment of this writing (Nov 8th 2020), I'm finally beginning to understand how to do web scrapping and some very simple data analysis.

Just allow me to diverge from the topic for a moment to tip my metaphorical hat to those around here who are professionals in Data Science or are studying to do so. I have to say that, I had no idea how much insight you can gather about a subject from just a few well-thought lines of code.

Now, cutting straight to the point.

As a way to cross two of my favorite hobbies, I decided an analysis to see what kind of info I could extract from the Guild, especially the Casual section since it has the most traffic.

Here are two charts detailing some of the things I decided to get a detailed look at (considering the posts in the 1st 100pages only to keep it relevant-ish to the status of the Guild today):

[h3]1st - Tag popularity:[/h3]
[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/vUBRu9z.png[/img][/center]
I'm sure every GM around here must have thought about what are the best tags to put in a topic, or better yet what are the best kinds of RPs to attract attention. So this was my first stop.

As you can see, not a single one of the first 2500 topics in the casual section has the casual tag, which is the reason for this post's title since I found that incredibly ironic to the point of being outlandish. After all, what does that say about the people in the casual forum?

Putting that aside, and considering only the genre tags, we can see that Fantasy, Modern, Fandom, and Anime/Manga are the most popular tags. So, if anyone ever wondered what kind of RP is on vogue/the most common, there's your answer.

[h3]2nd - RPs created over time:[/h3]
[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/ok4AuPy.png[/img][/center]
Because people say their RPs aren't as popular anymore, that they few ignored, or have the impression that the Guild is dying somehow. I wanted to see the truth about that and, as you all can see, what appears to have happened is that was a wild, almost ridiculous explosion of new topics created around Summer 2017.

We have been on a gradual decline back to the original stable numbers of the Guild ever since then. What I theorize that is the cause of complaints of lack of activity is people who joined around the boom and aren't used to the old pace being slowly reestablished. So yeah, it's not anyone's posts that are particularly bad or anything like this, it's just that we are going back to the near flatline pace that was between 2014 and late 2016.

So, what's your opinion about this? I think this is the most insight we had about the guild in years, and it really changed how I see things here.

PS: here's the link for the code if anyone wants to take a look/modify it for other sections/etc.
[url]https://github.com/Final-Palladium/simple-rpguild-data-analysis/blob/main/rpguild_scrape.ipynb[/url]