[quote=@FinalPalladium]
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.
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I want to point out that RPG has existed a lot longer than since 2014. In early 2014 the website was entirely deleted and by the time Mahz rebuilt it on a new server it lost a massive amount of users and activity. It was actually originally made in 2007, I myself having joined it in 2008. I don't know how easy it would be to get the data from before the Guildfall, or if its even possible, but going off my memory alone the activity RPG gained once it was back up was a shadow of its former self. Don't know how I would compare it to the activity data you presented, but I'd reckon that "usual" RPG activity was probably comparable or greater than the 2017 spike you observed.

It's already been mentioned about the bot invasion that year, but also worth noting is that in 2017 that Mahz returned from a long break and continued working on the site as well as the creation of the site's Discord. Both of these could've contributed to the elevated levels of activity, as the bot invasion wouldn't explain why there wasn't an immediate drop in activity after it was resolved. I think that year a few rival sites changed their policies about accepting new users to make it "invite only" and that may have contributed as well.