Forums Forums Wirral Information Ask - Wiki Wirral WikiWirral usage.

I may be wrong but traffic to this site seems to be fast approaching zero. This is a pity as I believe the site has value.

If I'm right, what can be done to improve things? Suggestions please.

Forums like this have suffered because of the likes of Facebook, X and Instagram, gladly I subscribe to non of them.

I believe the demise of this forum started when subscription charges started to view the many photographs voluntary posted by members for other members to view.

If everyone could view the photo's, it just might encourage discussion.

Yes, being invited to look at pictures that you can't see is annoying.

I see I am now one of the three 'top posters' who have posted in the past day with one post. In other words only three posts a month. I wonder how much longer it will survive.

As I write this there are supposedly over 35,000 guests looking in, perhaps it will survive because of those type of figures.

Unfortunately the high figures are probably due to AI bot swarms which are gradually taking over the whole internet. It used to be bad at times due to search bots but the AI bot swarms are far worse.

Blame the advertising industry, they are the main funders of the internet and govern how the internet is used. It is an invisible tax on consumers. There isn't a solution, the advertisers are trapped in a perpetual cycle of competitive advertising and the consumers have no say in the matter.

Perhaps one day, some more analytic companies will expose the truth about internet advertising, like doing a study asking consumers to name all the brands/products they saw advertised on the internet the day before. I imagine most responders will report very little (zero in my case), saturation advertising has made us advertising-blind. The huge amount of advertising money is pretty much wasted but we are still paying for it financially and time-wise.

Some stats on the following link, not forgetting that the company producing these stats are heavily biased in favour of advertising eg I fail to believe anybody remembers 98 adverts a day as claimed in the student figures. Despite the positive bias I find the figures horrendous. https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-marketing/marketing-trends/how-many-ads-do-we-see-a-day/

It keeps telling you not available i have been trying to find post from a few years ago about the Rivacre

Is it this one,

https://www.wikiwirral.co.uk/forums...78/re-rivacre-valley-ellesmere-port.html

Being relatively late to the party finding and joining the site I can imagine in its hay day it was buzzing with activity.

I stumbled upon the site when someone sent me a link to view some pictures only to find I was unable to. I have enjoyed looking back at some old posts despite not being able to view images associated with them.

I’m not a member of any of the main social media sites but I can see the attraction and the draw from sites like this!

I think the site is brilliant and I honestly think the only thing that has killed it is the restrictions in place.

I would say open up the pictures to everyone and make viewing them free, I genuinely think it will make the site appealing and approachable. I can’t help but think how many people have been sent links to view this and that only to arrive and be greeted with not being allowed to see them. That’s a quick way to make someone forget you!

You have to remember someone will always offer something you don’t or won’t!

Forums just can't compete against the intentionally addictive algorithms the social media giants use. Also the amount of manpower required to run/administer/moderate a forum has gone up thanks largely to malicious people. I don't understand it, finding information on social media is a nightmare but it appears very few people wnat to do this, how many people were aware of the old twitter advanced search page, hardly any, twitter themselves didn't promote it. People are being programmed into here-and-now instantaneous gratification which is creating huge social and mental health problems.

Search engines haven't helped, while at one time they indexed virtually everything, some years ago they changed to mainly indexing or at least prioritising updated information and dropping static information.

Even non-forum websites are on the decline, many companies only have social media presence and no website of their own.

If someone was prepared to fully sponsor or fund WikiWirral in perpetuity, I'm sure Mark would prefer to have that and open up images etc again.