As you might know, I'm one of the administrators over on OtakuBoards, theOtaku's sister forums site. And, if you were around on OB the past few weeks, you probably noticed the site was pretty inactive. Not a lot of people joining, not a lot posting, not much happening at all.
For a lot of the site's life (that I can remember accurately), theOtaku had a link to OtakuBoards somewhere fairly prominent. I myself found OB through a forums link on theO, way back in 2001. So, being a forum that features anime discussion as one of its main topics, we naturally got a lot of members from theO visitors.
But that changed with theOtaku's last layout revision before Version Vibrant here. The link to OtakuBoards was taken down and activity slowly dropped off. Up until a few days ago OB was at the lowest slump in activity that I had ever seen, and I've been there for over six years and also have access to all the activity statistics in the admin cp. At one point I even commented on Adam's myOtaku page saying that the feature I wanted most for Version Vibrant was another link to OB on theO's front page.
With Version Vibrant live now, I've gotten my wish and OB is once again linked to from theO. Not only that, but OB was the first of the three sites to come back up during the server move, which gets much love from me.
So, how has this affected activity levels on OB? I could tell you but I think this chart from the admin cp stats pages shows it best. (Everyone loves charts.) It shows the number of new members who have registered each day over the past month:
March 3-4 is when the sites went down and OB was the first to come back up. Now, some of this is due to the other two sites not being available for those two days and a link to OB being provided on the holding page. But still, I think it's obvious how much difference that connection with theOtaku makes.
UPDATE:
I updated the chart to include the first two days that Version Vibrant has been live. As I figured, we didn't maintain 100 new members per day but 35 and 34 is still way better than the single digits we were getting before.
