I can notice similar decrease of messages over the years at FireBase
discussion list too.

10 years ago, there was so little technical information about IB/FB
freely available that discussion lists/forums were the main resource
for posting questions and getting some kind of support. Nowadays we
have lots of articles, spreaded documentation, faqs, etc. so probably
people only go to lists after "standard" resources are exhausted.

I dont like using facebook, orkut or event online forums (phpBB,etc)
for support purposes, but I'm an old school man :)

[]s
Carlos
Firebird Performance in Detail - http://videos.firebirddevelopersday.com
www.firebirdnews.org - www.FireBase.com.br

MB> arda wrote:

>> I've just looked at the message count over years (jan-june)
>>
>> 2004 : 9713 messages
>> 2005 : 9695 messages
>> 2007 : 4497 messages
>> 2009 : 3778 messages
>> 2012 : 2222 messages
>>
>> What do you think?

MB> People are moving away from mailing lists, or, to be more precise,
MB> younger developers prefer other communication channels. Especially since
MB> there are many more websites and resources on the Internet that cover
MB> the basic questions beginners might ask. I met a few young developers
MB> some time ago, they asked some questions about Firebird. I directed them
MB> to this mailing list, but they were like "Mailing list? That's so 90's."
MB> A few days later I found their questions posted on StackOverflow website.

MB> The way people communicate online has changes in past couple of years.
MB> USENET is practically dead, and mailing lists are slowly decaying. Even
MB> classic web forums are getting replaced with sites like SO or some sorts
MB> of social networks.

MB> If you want to track Firebird popularity, I would rather look at
MB> download counts. Although that is not very precise to get number of
MB> installations (you can download once and deploy thousands of copies), it
MB> does give a rough estimate of the number of developers, as they do
MB> download a couple of copies and that's about it.