I'm a late-comer here. Starting looking at Mudcat regularly in 2009, but I've been a user of newsgroups, bulletin boards etc from back in the days of CIX (UK) and CompuServe (pre AOL buyout) in the very early 90s.

What I've seen from membership of a whole bunch on on-line communities in that time (alt.rockclimbing, compuserve outdoors, compuserve education, talk.origins, UKclimbing, weighlossresources, and a whole bunch of others over the years) is that all websites, and particularly their forum/ forum users, go through certain cycles, broadly similar but with slightly different outcomes.

There's an early flush of enthusiasm from the people who start the site. If the site becomes popular it starts to spin-off real-life meet-ups and get-togethers. This leads to a lot of real-life friendships and relationships ( including marriages and other long-term partnerships: I know of at least 50 couples, for example, who've met through UKClimbing.com, and that's just the ones I know personally).

There's then a period of people complaining that the site has become "cliquey" or is dominated by an "in" group. This is often not true as becoming "in" usually involves no more than being willing to participate/ contribute, but it's easy to see how less gregarious people can feel that a clique has developed.

Then, one of two things seems to happen....the site either declines in popularity, people leave and it eventually closes or becomes totally moribund. OR it remains active, but a lot of the original users leave, complaining that it's "not what it used to be" (of the 24 people who come to my UKClimbing Winter Meets in Scotland....permed from a "rolling population" of about 50, I'd say that in any one year, 2/3 of them are now "former" UKC-ers who either never, or hardly ever, log on there anymore, despite the site's high volume of members generally).

Occasionally a site has an injection of new enthusiasm from a second generation of newcomers who bring it back to life.

Sites that remain very active (and positively so) tend to be those where a good percentage of users have open minds and are willing to see change as a positive. That's one strong downside of Mudcat to me....there seems to be an awfully high percentage of people here who are stuck in a rut, looking back both musically and from a lifestyle viewpoint to some time in their youth when everything was much better than it is now. I've said before that it really doesn't feel very welcoming to young people from that viewpoint. I'm sure it'll keep going for as long as it can be hosted, as the knowledge database is a fabulous resource, but I suspect the forum use will continue to decline as older members go to the "Great Gig In The Sky" and are not replaced by sufficient youngsters to keep up a decent critical mass.