All of the forums I visit regularly (half a dozen, at most) are falling off in the number of posts since their heyday. And most of the posts are from long term members. This seems to be a phenomenon going on across a wide spectrum of forums. Maybe it's just the type of forums I tend to visit. The few forums I hit that are highly active are what I'd call "informational forums". Questions are asked, answers are given, but there is no feeling of friendship. It's like looking something up in an encyclopedia. It gets the job done, but it's not terribly exciting. Most of my forums I hit because of the people, not the content. ETS is one of those. Although the content is excellent, there is more of a draw to see what friends are up to than to get a specific question answered. Maybe this is part of getting older - I just don't have that many questions anymore, or I've forgotten what it was that I wanted to ask about!

I've also noted that long timers will drift off of a forum for a while. Sometimes years. Then out of nowhere, they're back! That's fun to see when it happens.

I would say the main focus of ETS is preparation for adventures that go wrong, or disasters. That, and also general outdoors type stuff. I imagine there are many here now who are as old as, or even older than I am. I'm 61-1/2. There are some really healthy and in shape folks this age, but unfortunately I cannot count myself in that group. I'm doing fine, but I'm not climbing 14k mountains anymore. I'm not going on two week wilderness backpacking trips anymore. My camping trips? Heck yeah, I'm going on one in a couple of weeks with my friends (we do it every year)! We cook gourmet food, fire up the waffle iron and Kuerig in the morning, eat frozen gelato for desserts ... you know, "old peoples camping". If the heat gets too bad, we fire up the air conditioner in the trailer. We used to go for one night when we started 35 years ago. Now we stay for four. We don't do additional activities, it just takes us longer to do the same old ones these days (hiking, biking, kayaking). I used to bring my telescopes, but not anymore (we don't stay awake late enough to be able to use them).

Times change. So do forums. Sometimes we go nostalgic over the old days of the forums, and forget that there are still good days to come. We're just "taking a nap" a little bit right now in the overall post count.