What’s clear is that LGU and forum.hellug.gr has a very different pool of posters. Forum did not actually steal any LGU members, as many had feared that would happen, but it covers an entirely different part of the Linux users pool.

The latest LGU posts are of very high complexity, they are mostly asked by people who are already experienced and they need some very specific guidance. On the other hand, the posts on the forum are mostly from more inexperienced users and they are general topics like “how to change my resolution”, “how to add greek support”, etc. This topics were once scoffed on LGU and people had stopped posting such topics before forum even started.

Both LGU and forum should continue doing their much needed work. There were/are/will be always issues with user behavior on both but I hope that these won’t stop people from asking questions or stopping others from replying to them.

I’ have to ponder a bit about the apparent decline in email posts. One of the things I was sort of expecting was a rise in forum subscriptions and an equally impressive rise in forum posts. While there are new forum users subscribing every month, I am not sure these are the users who would post to l.g.u anyway, so we have to look elsewhere for the real reasons of the decrease in list email.

One of the reasons may be that the list subscribers are a mostly static group of people, who are getting older. We used to be about 20 years old when l.g.u started. We are not in our 30’s and have other things to do, so we post less and less messages, because we have a few more things to keep us busy now.

I am not sure, though, and I certainly feel highly uncertain about extrapolating from my personal experience to draw conclusions about the wider population of the entire l.g.u subscriber base.

I think it makes sense to factor into any attempt to analyze the post count graphs what Markos said too. Back in 1997 forums were a new and slightly unknown way of posting information online. The proliferation of different Greek forums during the last few years may have played a very significant role in fragmenting the user base to many disjoint parts. The total of all Greek computer users who know about Linux and use the Internet has probably increased a lot, but we now have a multitude of places to post, instead of 4-5 “well known” mailing lists.

I’ have to ponder a bit about the apparent decline in email posts. One of the things I was sort of expecting was a rise in forum subscriptions and an equally impressive rise in forum posts. While there are new forum users subscribing every month, I am not sure these are the users who would post to l.g.u anyway, so we have to look elsewhere for the real reasons of the decrease in list email.

One of the reasons may be that the list subscribers are a mostly static group of people, who are getting older. We used to be about 20 years old when l.g.u started. We are not in our 30’s and have other things to do, so we post less and less messages, because we have a few more things to keep us busy now.

I am not sure, though, and I certainly feel highly uncertain about extrapolating from my personal experience to draw conclusions about the wider population of the entire l.g.u subscriber base.