We have discussed this before and it is sad. As Tim said, many of the more active members are gone. For my part I tend to be passive, in that while I am delighted to take part in discussions I rarely start any. Recently I was very disappointed to note that there was no mention of the trooping of the colour, no mention of the marriage of Prince Carl Philip of Sweden and no mention of the birth of Princess Madeleine's baby (Nicolas). I fear that people have either lost interest or moved elsewhere.
Cheers,
GREENOWL
I think it's the latter Greenowl, as I have mentioned before. I hovered over this site for a while but I'm only a relatively recent AP member (January, 2012). The thing is - assuming the metrics they post are accurate - this site gets more visitors now, on average, than it ever has. It is posts and "active" members that are only fraction of what they used to be, but I feel like the slowdown was inevitable.
Social media has gone from a somewhat popular platform - as it was in 2003/04 when the AP was launched - to being positively ubiquitous. I see several AP members that post things regularly on their Facebook pages and I assume do most of their conversing through their as well. Then you have the simple fact that since the AP has become such a huge database for information and platform for discussion through the years there is simply not nearly as much left out there to post about. Want to know about Danish royals? It's here! Want to know which perfume scents OTMA preferred? That's covered too!
As the FA is forced to constantly remind newer members, if you simply use to search function and put a little effort in you will likely find that there are already answers to your questions on here. 90% of what we discuss has to do with people/events that existed decades or centuries ago. There just aren't that many new revelations being unearthed, as one might expect once enough time passes.
The one area that has declined into virtually nothing that was the source of great discussion a few years ago was political talk. There were more posts on the 2008 US elections alone than on any other topic. I think a lot of good folks probably got annoyed and offended - as political talk will always do - and jetted shortly thereafter. Honestly though this is a history forum, not a current (non-Royal) events site. So far as I'm concerned it's just as well we aren't talking much about those social/political topics anymore...even if I'm as guilty in my involvement as anyone :-)
We are in the midst of a golden age of rare photos. And a big thanks goes out to some of those special few who give us these great new images to look at almost daily! My only disappointment with the AP crowd is how historical topics don't ever seem to catch fire. You get a good intellectual subject on assessing the reign of Nicholas II, or who deserves most of the blame for WWI, or ranking the Tsar's, that seems to get buried after only a few posts. I feel like topics such as those would have generated dozens or hundreds of replies a few years ago instead of just a handful.
