LabVIEW
1.25M messages in the LabVIEW board
It's quite simple, actually. Everyone has finally learned everything about LabVIEW from the forums, so there is no need to come here and post. 😉
Actually, that's almost the real explanation, although not the root cause. The root cause is there are fewer and fewer new developers, so less questions are being asked. At least, IMO.
I think usage of LabVIEW has fallen a lot and you'll find a lot of correlates showing that.
It is definitely interesting data. But I can't help but notice it started dropping off in 2017 and that was when NXG 1.0 was released. I am not saying it caused it, just pointing out the timing.
@_Bryan wrote:
It is definitely interesting data. But I can't help but notice it started dropping off in 2017 and that was when NXG 1.0 was released. I am not saying it caused it, just pointing out the timing.
It may be a correlation but I'm not quite sure a cause. The first slowing down can be already seen from 2013. That is about the time NI decided they needed to do something else than selling DAQ boards to be able to keep growing with 2 digit numbers year over year. They set out to conquer vertical markets by building entire test systems rather than test system components. They made very little noise about that as it was directly going to compete with their traditional partners, but they build a strategy to go that path nevertheless. A few years before they also had decided that LabVIEW was difficult to maintain and keep developing and had started a project to create a new platform that eventually was called LabVIEW NXG.
At about the same time it was slowly noticeable that NI people were getting less involved in answering questions on the forum. Also many products started to get discontinued, partly because of necessity because parts were hard or impossible to source anymore, partly to consolidate the manufacturing towards high volume products with good margins and get rid of low volume products that were more and more expensive to support. And around 2017 it was getting more and more noticeable that NI people while not getting punished for being active on the forum, also didn't really get any rewards or incentives for doing so. This naturally led to them disappearing more and more from the forums with the exception of a few diehard enthusiasts. So yes the numbers clearly show a diminishing number of posts but that is also because NI itself got less and less active on the forum. First because the missing posts of NI people directly affected the post count, second because many questions were mostly answered by some voluntary enthusiasts who had their own criteria what to answer and how professional to be with that.
That the number of active users also dropped for sure didn't help, but which was the chicken and which was the egg could probably be debated about quite a bit. 😁
There was a phase, I think starting even before 1999 where NI had already a forum but all being new it was not very much frequented directly. Instead they had a gateway to the LabVIEW mailing-list server they had setup earlier. I preferred the mailing-list format to the forum solution a lot, since there wasn't yet an always-on internet connection but you had to dial-up to an internet provider, initiate the synchronization with the mailing-list server and then disconnect and go through the posts, answer whatever you wanted to answer and then connect again and all the answers were sent to the mailing-list server.
The gateway would regularly scrape the mailing-list server and add each message thread to the forum. The messages shown here might be from that, but they generally looked more teletype like in their format. 😁
It also had the problem that depending from which computer you connected to the mailing-list and which exact email address was used for that connection, the gateway wasn't always able to associate posts to the same user account. I have (or had) several accounts in the forum because of that. There was a time when one could contact the NI forum manager (Laura I think) to have such accounts merged but by the time I learned about that the forum software had changed multiple times and merging of accounts was apparently a feat that required super human powers. 😁
Some of those messages definitely seem to have gotten lost in the deep cracks of information archeology.
