What happened in December 2008?

[na golfball]

Hey guys, first of all if you did not know you can check every members last date of activity, when they registered, post count by clicking on the "members" tab at the top of the page.

In addition to that at the bottom of your page near where it shows who is online you should see a "show more stats" option. Click on that and it will show the top 10 posters, topic starters, and ppl who have the most time online here.
Underneath the stats section it gives a breakdown of this sites history: showing the emount of topics started, posts, and new members for every month since this website began....

Now, when you look at this (I encourage you to look) you'll notice that we see steadu growth from November 07 until November 08. There is something weird/catostrophic about the following month...

In December 08 we see:
Topics started decline by 330%
Replies decline by around 400%

From that we never make a recovery. There are a couple glimmers of hope, but those numbers could be skewed by bots.
So the question is...What happened in December 2008 and how can we avoid that same mistake???

[Ponked]

Forum leadership largely disappeared, all at the same time.

[GE Master]

Negligence. Not intentional on my part, but that did indeed happen. The biggest issue was that I didn't check in and didn't see that bots had moved in. I was of the believe that things were setup for that to never happen. Ultimately it's my responsibility.