So! It has been exactly 1 year since we launched the Ansible forum. That seems like a good time for a retrospective 
The stats
Back in Sept '23 I did a launch retrospective after just 2 weeks, in which we were pretty happy to see a spike in traffic of 6,000 views (which settled back down to 2,000 after a few days). I’m happy to say we now see that every day
We’re seeing around 150 topics and 600 posts per month (considerably more than the old mailing lists were getting even a year ago):
And our daily engaged users has stabilised at around 25-30 people/day (not counting weekends):
Just to put this in context, let’s compare to Reddit, since that’s the other big area of traffic/eyeballs:
| Last 30 days | Discourse | |
|---|---|---|
| Pageviews | 240k | 600k |
| Topics | 147 | 116 |
| Posts | 614 | 775 |
| Members (Total) | 4335 | 64232 |
| Members (Growth) | 282 (+6.5%) | 657 (+1.0%) |
So, a little under half the pageviews (not the best metric, but the most comparable) - but more topics (which Reddit calls posts) and almost as many posts (which Reddit calls comments).
Most encouragingly is that we continue to grow faster - while Reddit has a huge subscriber base (65k to our 4k), most of it accumulated over the long tail of its history. So, instead we look to growth, where we see still getting new forum members 6x faster than Reddit.
I’m not comparing this to the old mailing list because it involves counting things by hand, but I feel comfortable in claiming that 600+ posts and ~300 new members is more activity than is going on over there at the moment 
All of that, of course, is down to you fine people! Please keep using the site and spreading the word - this is the home of the Ansible ecosystem 
Structure and usage
Of course, we should talk a little about how the use of the forum has evolved this year. I think there’s 4 main areas to look at:
Firstly, and most obvious to newcomers, the Get Help category is the most numerous in terms of posts. We’re see reasonable use of the Solved function to mark posts as completed, but we can always do better. Please use it if someone help you! They get credit, and badges, and warm fuzzies that are good for everyone.
Second, Project Discussions continues to hold important discussions about direction & design in the ecosystem. All voices are welcome there, please don’t feel like you need to meet some bar before you can participate! All voices help to make things better and you all have a unique viewpoint.
Our events category is slowly building momentum - I still hold hope for this being the hub of “what’s happening in Ansible” so if you’re giving a talk, attending a related conference, or anything similar, please post it here!
Our Groups are doing well as a way to self-organise around topics and be notified of relevant conversations. If you haven’t taken a look at the group list yet, it’s worth doing
Wrapup
My biggest worry when launching the forum was “what if I’m wrong? what if we just fragment things further?” so I’m immensely happy to see that it seems to be working - that this tool helps us to work together well, help each other out, and discuss the future in a sensible way. It might have been my idea, but you all made it happen, so thank you for being here .
The future is bright. In a few weeks time we’ll be shuttering the old mailing lists and importing the archives here (read-only, but searchable) which means for the first time we’ll have all our archives in one place, held by us (most of you know my views on Google Groups 
). After that, who knows? There are more things we can do with this platform, maybe we can explore them
For now, feel free to put you thoughts in the birthday thread, and get yourself a badge.
To the next year! Onwards!