How should we continue our project?

Community
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Hi all,
It’s been a bit more than year since I started using Discourse for our project. Our project is similar to SO/Math Exchange. It’s basically a QA community that contains categories like math, CS, science, LaTeX and so on, where you can ask questions and get answers. The community is not in English since the project is designed for the local community. The code features are: Voting, MathJax, and QA (thanks Pavilion!). It’s also contains a category where users can just talk about anything. The discourse also has a unique theme. Also we have a facebook page for the project. We have great SEO and we even have a rank of ~300K of the website in alexa.

As I mentioned, the project exists for a bit more than a year now and we want to do some rethinking about the future of the project. It had it’s up and downs throughout the year but now it just going down. The best period of time was when we did a little competition in the Math category (five rounds where each has a problem with multiple solutions and the best unique solution would win). The community is searchable, meaning it contains a lot of interesting keywords and backlinks. Throughout the time, we created many “dummy” threads with special keywords in math, CS and so on, so it will be visible in Google searches (and it actually is).

There were no posts during the last month in the community. Some of the users come back to the community but there is no activity. That’s really frustions and it raises some thoughts about the future of the project. I’m tired of creating those fake posts in order to get keywords and trying to “show” that there is activity in the community. It just looks like no one wants to contribute to the project.

For the last month I were not so active in the website (entered to check if everything is ok once in a while). I would thought the users will continue on their own using the website but I was wrong - there was no activity at all.

Have someone been in that place? What should we do? Do we need to think about closing the project? I will be more than happy to hear some stories and tips but the situation.

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There’s a hint right there. You gave your users something to get involved with along an incentive to participate. I’m curious to know what they would win. Maybe spending more time on something like this instead of the fake posts/threads would be a better use of your time.

While my forum is completely different from what yours is set up for, I know there are some that post here that are involved in learning online. Maybe one of those admins will chime in soon. Good luck.

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