I haven't been on in a long time.

Been practicing here and there, would be cool to get practiced up enough to start recording again. The site still gets traffic, but there's no pressure to comment like there is on youtube.

From the google analytics, there's always at least someone lurking, practicing, often more especially on the weekends.

In a way, it's kinda cool that the social stuff on most tabs is like, corrections and tips, but it does make it feel like a ghost town when nobody feels the need to make comments.

But then it's more valuable to look at the comments, no pressure for people to comment "first" or anything like that.

I still have the forum blocked from search engine results, still doing some work on it behind the scenes. When it's back on, some people will come to forum when they google something like "guitar tuning help", but for now, it's just people who noticed there's a "Forum" button now that wasn't there before

That's good to know there are at least people lurking, and presumably playing the tabs. The bygone days where people would come to this site to relax and interact with other people here is sorely missed.

There's not really a big central place for VG guitarists to call home anymore. Recordings uploaded on Youtube used to bring a huge audience to this site, but people don't record as much these days.

There are some skilled guitarists uploading recordings of their own work, but it's usually behind a paywall or they redirect to their own site. Not that I blame them, people gotta eat, but it feels like the few people who still play VG guitar are spread out thin.

I'm also adding some social aspects to the site, like the very recent thumbs up/down here in the forum. Not done adding them where I want to. I still need to finish the reporting feature, where someone can flag user-generated-content as abusive or whatever.

I just looked in the google analytics, it said there were about 312 active users yesterday, slightly more the day before, and a little more the day before that. I think people just don't have reason to comment on things and have barely noticed the forum is back cause, you know, not advertising it at all quite yet. It's hard to tell when anyone is on the site unless they comment, except for that tiny view-count on tabs.

The latest tabs all get a good amount of views, and that's with some bot protection from upping the view counts on tabs. When people that come from the same IP address, like those on VPNs can only increase a tab view count once per 10 minutes, if you're a suspected bot view counts don't go up. That recent Claire Obscure tab has over 3300 views already.

I think people are practicing. I should look at the rate of people favoriting tabs. I know though from the global number when I imported favorites, people never used the feature much even back in the day.

I want to add a little cross pollination to the forum as like a little side bar on a tab page, and vice-versa. Lots of big plans going forward for the site.

At some point, would be cool to run an ad on youtube 😊

The forum now doubles as a "Tab Request" system, would be cool if people started using it. I need to add a "request a tab" on the main home page, and in tab result lists

312 active users is a decent amount, more than it feels like anyhow. Though I wonder how many of those are bots.

In regards to the low social interaction here, there's also the difference in how online social media works now compared to back then. Social media sites like Twitter and such weren't nearly as popular so there was more reason to come here and talk about your day compared to now.