IMHO, The website is a dinosaur. Clunky, slow, unreliable with less than optimal management tools. It may have been state of the art when I started posting 12 years ago, but any improvements seem to have been cosmetic. It is hard for me to justify to myself paying Max to house servers and t1s and whatnot, when we could all just move to a cloud based service, faster, fully reliable, with lots of forum friendly features for next to free.

I don't think there are fewer posters, There do seem to be fewer posts. Not as many topics interest me as before and several of the catters I used to come here to read have switched to Facebook and I touch base with them there.

Eliza, I said to Larry Saidman, that 2 % of the members make 80% of the noise. Certainly, you and I had a recent conversation which was, to put it kindly, heckled. That happened for two reasons, a value of this forum is free exchange and minimal censorship, which is a very good thing, and the moderation is unstructured and a little inconsistent. But though I recognize that, I am simply pointing it out and NOT complaining, because it is volunteer and even if I thought I could do better, I don't have the patience or the times.

IMHO I think that it is inevitable that people will slip away from this group. Max obviously does not have the resources to compete with Facebook, and even middle aged fogies like me lose interest after the same topics have been debated more than 5 times. We are not exactly a draw for the youth.

I certainly don't agree with the implied premise of this. "And you wonder WHY so few people post to Mudcat any longer????????" People have not decreased their number of posts because other people are arguing. People have always argued here. In fact the current lack of arguments about the forum itself is a relief and a blessing. Posting has declined because though the love their friends here, people have found other ways to express themselves and other things to do.