Don't be upset. It is typical in summer months for user participation to sort of drop off. Even webmasters have families, summer travel is popular.

Besides, some topics are extremely niche, to the point where there are only two or three discussions a year.

Over the last few years, the site has done a fair bit of cleanup and consolidation, but I think there are still some categories that had meaning in 2004 but not so much today.

I'm back and I finally got my password reset.

I was PM'd maybe 15 years ago about mobile stuff.

I can't believe how right I was.

Hi, I am Shri, a recovering (and retired) webmaster. I read through stuff and have little clue of whats going on and really have no profound thoughts or insights. :)

I also find it quiet in WebmasterWorld at the moment.

In past years it was much busier.

I am certain there are webmastering discussions occurring on the net, but for some reason they aren't happening so much here.

When I joined 23 years ago, topics seemed to cover mostly HTML, CSS, JavaScript, cross browser functionality (remember Netscape?) and PHP/ASP coding. With the advent of CMS like WordPress and Shopify, there is less demand/requests for help in those areas and, IMHO, everyone seems to want to discuss Google Adsense. In fact, I commented some time ago about it being only the second day of the month and there was already a thread about Google Adsense observations, as there is every month. It seems like the forum shifted from how to develop a website to how to develop an Adsense campaign. Personally, I still build websites from scratch, hate CMS platforms, and could care less about Adsense. That is why I do not comment as often as I use to.

Hi Marshall, we both joined in 2001, it was much busier back then.

I wonder if it is possible to turn it round. And I wonder if the WebmasterWorld subscription area is any busier?

I wonder if the WebmasterWorld subscription area is any busier?

It isn't. (Unless my subscription lapsed when I wasn't looking.) Haven't even seen a Review My Site request in a while.

WebmasterWorld isn't the only forum whose visible participation has plummeted. Sometimes people have moved over to FB groups, though I tend to doubt that's the case here.

Hi lucy24, I can't believe that interest in websites and their management and promotion is an area / activity that will have waned, if anything there are more websites than ever (is that right?) and the people behind them will probably turn to the wider internet for support. But why WebmasterWorld before and not any more? I don't have any answers.

There's also the "burn out" problem where the same questions get answered time and again and newbies don't take advantage of the archived posts which already have the answers.

I know I fall into that category (sigh) and just move on when a post is yet another repeat.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men..." - William Shakespeare

WW belongs to its time and place when webmasters would code HTML1 with Notepad and a monthly Google dance could be manipulated by those with fairly basic indexing knowledge. Corporates didn't have e-marketing teams.
I was talking to an IT student the other day and had to explain what Cobol, Dos 3.3 and Assembler once was.
I think the TikTok generation may not be as compatible with WW as we once were.

newbies don't take advantage of the archived posts which already have the answers.

I know I fall into that category (sigh) and just move on when a post is yet another repeat.

Hi tangor I expect I have been guilty of posting questions which have already been dealt with, I know it is a weak defence but sometimes search brings up so many threads / posts it can be hard to find what I am looking for.

The two busiest threads on here are the Google organic and the Google Adsense threads, there is plenty of activity on these threads daily - but much less over the rest of the site.

20+ years ago the Web was an exciting place to be, with plenty of variety and with many of us making a lot of money whilst creating specialist websites that were really useful assets. Since then the bigger companies have moved in and been helped by Google to take away much of the business. The overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs I used to discuss things with went out of business a long time ago as a result.

The fact is that there is no longer very much chance of an Internet startup succeeding in the face of the big-business bias of Google, so far fewer people around who would use a forum like this. Simple really.

https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2024-06-28/italy-claims-1-billion-euros-in-unpaid-taxes-from-google

Things like this and similar can help only

the Google organic and the Google Adsense threads

Funny, I think of those as entirely separate and unrelated to the rest of the forum. AdSense, in particular, is filled with names I’ve never seen anywhere else. And who knows? Maybe the people who are active in those threads think of the rest of WebmasterWorld as unrelated fluff.

webmasterworld could relax the rules a bit.
when i have a coding problem i'll always ask it on stackoverflow.
i hardly ever ask those types of questions here because if you include a URL you know it's going to get instantly deleted and you'll get a telling off.
but for a lot of problems it genuinely does help to show the url -- it makes it a lot easier to describe the problem and have it answered.

webmasterworld has always been averse to links, but i think they're just losing loads of potential posts... mine included, and i've been here for years

I think the questions of yesterday are a lot less relevant today compared to then. I don't see this as a good thing, I see this as a knowledge void that is not being filled.

Let's go back to the early 2000s. Everyone had a computer and at some point, each of us thought... "I can build stuff with this". We started building, then we got questions and that's how many of us came across WebmasterWorld. If people today do not have a PC/computer then they are not going to have the tools we had. Even using a modern tablet or phone today, I would struggle to build the things I was building on my old computer from 2005.

Now, a lot of people are using simple drag-and-drop systems to "build" their web presence. They do not have the fundamental basics that would enable them to create something from scratch.

This is leading to a lack of skills within the industry and this may be very problematic moving forward.

Mack.

-- when i have a coding problem i'll always ask it on stackoverflow. --

It is not just codding issues. It is that there are a Related Questions/Topics section on stackoverflow(and not on WebmasterWorld), then most technical questions plugged into a Goog Search box bring back a stack of stackoverflow links on top of page.

AND

@mack gets an UP Vote for using a term of "the questions of yesterday"! Can we get that ranked as #1 on Goog these days?

I still visit WebMasterWorld almost daily, but I rarely log in or post a comment, so I expect that my visits are not actually counted anywhere. My occasional posts are usually intended to add some small bit of information to the on-going discussion, or to ask a question (searching for a solution). The topics discussed here that catch my eye are usually the technical ones about website design and structure, and coding, and the discussions about more philosophical questions, like this particular topic or about trends in the greater Internet, for example.

Since my own website is completely non-commercial, questions about advertising, revenue, and customers are of no real interest to me, although I recognize that those topics are a major concern of many of you. SEO, on the other hand, is an exception and I am quite sure that there are many improvements that I could learn to make, so I try to follow those discussions, too.

For me, WebMasterWorld is a very welcoming place, and certainly not dismissive or abrupt like some others. Unless there is some drastic change for the worse here, I will continue to visit and to value the information presented.

There's a ton of experience here, then and now.

The dumbest thing was not being able to link to other stuff. The first rule of having a forum about the web, don't link to the web? Right.

Understandable it was to avoid promotional posts and competitor ousting but still, I think it killed this place to a great extent.

brotherhood of LAN I get your point...
The problem is linking to websites within a question. This makes it a very specific problem and any answers will be mainly useful to the original poster. If however, they can make their question more generalised then it may be helpful to future users who experience a similar issue and find the post through a search engine.

Mack.

@mack

Indeed. Clearly the web didn't heed the "cool URIs don't change" advice. But then that's just how it is. I can't think of any other place that solves that issue (Stack Overflow comes to mind but there's plenty people who dislike their militant ruleset of how to Q and A).

Nowadays just getting human interaction on the web seems like a big win vs all the automation going on.