hi everybody and happy holidays! just coming in here real quick to point out that basement community is celebrating its 2nd birthday on December 3rd and just wanted to thank everybody for hanging out here and contributing to the site discussion!

I want to reflect a bit on this basement community in 2024 thread a bit and point and go through the list of accomplishments:

Technical Goals

Technically, the site came a long way this year. Looking back at the changelog from the beginning of this year, I was able to get out lots of new features, some highlights being:

• smileys

• thread sorting

• search

• email verification to prevent bot spam

• @ notification autocomplete

Right about now, the site is looking mature in its feature set. Honestly going forward, new updates are probably going to focus less on forum necessities and more on things to make this place more appealing and fun to use. A good example being the thread icons. I think I've pretty much checked every box that I wanted to and now I finally feel like I can focus more on the community aspect of the site.

Speaking of which...

Community Goals

Frankly, this year was pretty slow in terms of community-building. Looking again at the basement community in 2024 thread, I didn't really accomplish what I set out to, and only wrote a couple of web-related blog posts. I'd like to fix that this year.

So to help breathe some life into the site, I'm gonna be posting 🚨 1 new thread 🚨 for the entire month of December!!! holy shit that is very spammy, yes I am aware!!!! Call it a month-long event to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of the site.

Stats

I thought it might be interesting to see how the site has grown over the past year, so I pulled some user, thread, and post numbers from last year and compared them to this year

(excluding all deleted posts, threads, and users) on December 1st 2023, we had:

423 users 222 threads 1647 posts

and today we have:

544 users (up 121 from last year) 319 threads (up 97 from last year) 2854 posts (up 1207 from last year)

if you're paying attention to the math, you can see pretty clearly that the site did much better in the first year. I'm not sure if anyone remembers this, but this was due to a post blowing up on hackernews, which caused a massive rush of people to come to the site and make accounts. A lot of those accounts are dead, but we remember them in our hearts.

Closing Thoughts

In conclusion, this forum ain't going anywhere. It is still my passion project and if we only get a few users each year, that's honestly still a success in my book. Please spend more time on forums, they are the ideal way to chat online and if you want to find some more, take a look at our links page where you can find a bunch others to post on.

I will leave you with "Mistletoe" by Justin Beiber, one of the best Christmas songs ever created: