where have all the people gone?

Alien abduction?

Other places. Other websites. Other non-web activities.

Solar flares did them all in: Where Have All the People Gone (TV Movie 1974) - IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072400/)

Some (and I only know much, and still not a whole lot about the original) but some may have gotten tired of trying to figure our how to get to current questions and even if they did figure it out, they may have determined that they didn't want to do it every time. If I remember correctly, before the changes were made, I would click on my AMHD bookmark, and then click ANSWER and I was there at the questions. It took me a while to find the "new posts" button and get back to the two step process to get to new questions. I was using about a 4 step process to get there.
But I didn't give much consideration to moving on because I am an addict and have been for almost 7 years now.
During all that transition, I tried the vgo several times but I had a lot more problems and kept coming back to the old.
And during that same time frame, statements were made that a lot of effort would not be put into fixing bugs in the original skin. So,some like me (old fogeys) may have concluded that they couldn't operate in vgo, and that the bugs in the original weren't going to be fixed (seems to me the bugs have been fixed) so they decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
I have tried some other sites and they s*ck, plus I don't get my fix and start having withdrawal symptoms.

a likely explanation and here I was thinking something sereul like the rapture or we had reached the point were we didn't even want to post BORING!, hey there is an echo in here. My mouse has taken leave of its senses today or maybe its me, but I'm getting fed up with logging in, this site doesn't even remember me anymore, perhaps that's what happened, they are all shut out and find it too much trouble

I was hoping we'd get stories from people when they were on a bender talking about aliens abducting them from the trailer park and probing all their orifices.

It has been dead the past few months. Used to be if I went 12 hours without logging in, I would have at least a page and a half, usually more, to look through. Now, most of the time it's not even half a page. We're dying a slow death here on AMHD for some reason.

I was hoping we'd get stories from people when they were on a bender talking about aliens abducting them from the trailer park and probing all their orifices.

Nah, they've all become snooty vegans too good to deal with the likes of us.

https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/nutrition/why-vegans-so-self-centered-792399.html

Well there it is; the aliens have taken over. Smoothy will be happy; he can have his orifices probed

I don't want mine probed... I get a chuckle about drunks talking about aliens probing theirs while under the influence... as if that wasn't enough to get them to give up the bottle after the first occurrence.

The "people" have been stolen. Thats just a theory I have running right now. I have noticed a change in the bots/spiders that visit here and the majority (98%) are from a chinese website that is google's competitor in China. I am thinking they have stolen the spaces afforded to legitimate seach engine spiders like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Just to name a few. So if they can't get in here they in effect dont know what exists. To me it drives traffic away and is a boon to the Chinese for the information that is provided by this site. They appear to be mining it very heavily.

See, part of the liberal agenda, spear headed by Communism to silence the voice of truth.

Did you not get the memo? Godzilla is back! There are widespread power outages, cities and towns have been devoured by Mothra!

what you are saying is japcrap is back, those peope are obscessed with radio activity, I wonder why

The site just isn't engaging, there's no way to monetize it to make it worthwhile so developers spend no time on it, shifted to other projects. Pretty standard stuff.

The site just isn't engaging, there's no way to monetize it to make it worthwhile so developers spend no time on it, shifted to other projects. Pretty standard stuff.

This site makes money. Even as low as the count has been it is still making money. I still think it is the bots that have taken over and it is my belief they should be banned from the site (the Chinese bots) as we don't get much traffic if at all from China yet we do the rest of the world.


I vote for banning them and lets see if this place turns around.

Bots don't kill real people from finding, joining, and staying on the site. The downturn not due to any outside hackers or alien abduction, it's just not engaging enough for visitors to stay.. unless you count the traffic from India.

Here's some stats: askmehelpdesk.com Site Overview (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.askmehelpdesk.com)

The site just isn't engaging, there's no way to monetize it to make it worthwhile so developers spend no time on it, shifted to other projects. Pretty standard stuff.

What isn't engaging is the standard of the discussion, a lot of it is the same tired rhetoric or just crapping on

So true in 'Current Events'. Some of the other forums have recurring themes as well.

The "people" have been stolen. Thats just a theory I have running right now. I have noticed a change in the bots/spiders that visit here and the majority (98%) are from a chinese website that is google's competitor in China. I am thinking they have stolen the spaces afforded to legitimate seach engine spiders like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Just to name a few. So if they can't get in here they in effect dont know what exists. To me it drives traffic away and is a boon to the Chinese for the information that is provided by this site. They appear to be mining it very heavily.

Like here:https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/active-members/what-hell-789903.html

Has anything been asked/mentioned to Admin? What's the deal? It is not just slow - it is DEAD.

I stay logged in and although it is a little slower, I manage to find as much pleasure in it as I used to. Smoothy seems to do pretty good too.

After eight years here, not ready to throw in the towel !

The BOT thing really is important... if the Google, Bing and Yahoo Bots don't get here... the site will make a huge drop on search engine results. I don't think the chinese bots are really crowding them out... because that would effectively be a DNS type attack and people wouldn't be able to get in at all, which I haven't seen happen. I've always gotten in without problem. Except for the few times there were database errors that crashed the site the last few months.

The Google crawlers are indexing the site just fine, I just did a test.

Lot of websites see a seasonal dropoff at certain points of the year also... spring and summer tend to be low spots as people are doing other things away from the computer. Even discounting that there are ebbs and tides even from year to year. At least on the specialty sites, those are more hobbiest oriented... I don't know if the commercial online stores see the same sorts of seasonal variations (beyond Christmas).

You guys sound lonely, so visit some of the other forums. Even the plumbers are answering pregnancy questions.

I avoid most of those... I lose faith in the future of humanity reading some of the stupidity on a lot of those threads.

Procreation like driving a car should require passing a test to show basic knowledge before you are allowed behind the wheel. But then, who would live in trailer parks, and work at Walmart?

Lot of websites see a seasonal dropoff at certain points of the year also... spring and summer tend to be low spots as people are doing other things away from the computer.The Alexa link I posted shows a steady decline in traffic/ranking over the years.

The Alexa link I posted shows a steady decline in traffic/ranking over the years.That pretty much discounts specific events then. Like the upgrades and skin issues from being at fault.

It all took a drastic drop-off it seems when the new updates were done.

I didn't think that much time had passed since that was done... but maybe it has. If that peak was right before the upgrades. When was that exactly... I don't remember.

I don't recall when it all happened. All I do remember about it was that when it happened and we were having the problems, I kept wondering when the traffic was going to get back to normal and it just seems that it hasn't ever gone back to how it was before the updates.

The Google crawlers are indexing the site just fine, I just did a test.


It looks like the spider population is back to normal. The Baidu Spiders have a secondary spot now and not the primary one they had been at. They were occupying 98% of allocated bot space squeezing out the rest. Now lets see if there is a difference in search engine results.

Would the keywords or wording you use in the search engine be a big factor in this site coming up near the top? When I copy paste the OP questions we always are near the top, but not so much when I type just a part of the question.

Would the keywords or wording you use in the search engine be a big factor in this site coming up near the top? When I copy paste the OP questions we always are near the top, but not so much when I type just a part of the question.

A lot of it depends on the ranking for the page. How relevent is it to what is being asked. Then google rates it and that is how the position in the search engine is determined.

Google uses a formula for making the ranking and it has to have that information first.

Thanks dad, could you elaborate on the formula a bit and don't forget how dense I am on most things. Please no hard head jokes, I'm sensitive, :D

The actual formula is a secret. They do that to keep sites from tweaking to get to the top of the list without actually being valid to the point. Here are some links that are an easy read to help you understand "How Stuff Works".

The Google Search Engine Formula. (http://www.searchengineu.com/public/99.cfm)

Google Overhauls Search Engine Formula (http://news.sky.com/story/1147012/google-overhauls-search-engine-formula)

It used to be that I'd leave for an hour, come back, and not only have updates on every thread I had posted on, but pages of new questions.

Now I can leave for days, come back, have one or two updates on threads I posted on, and 5 or six new questions since the last time I posted.

Sad.