The top of this post is new. The stuff at the bottom is the remains of the original post. I'm keeping it so people can see what the first people replied to.
New post:
The "path back to old greatness" has really sped up now. I think the graph mostly speaks for itself, so I'll just post that.
The last bump up at the end is from 19th November to now, meaning it's post Wii U.
Old post follows:
A couple of months ago, I made this thread http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=141619&page=1#51 to view the pattern of the sales forum, but it went on to include all of the VGChartz forums. I figured doing it a bit more properly now could be interesting, especially as it seems to have picked up population wise.
So, I decided to check by checking the amount of days that passed between post 4,000,000 and 4,100,000, 4,100,000 and 4,200,000, etc. Then I just turned that into amount of posts per day, and popped it into chart form.
(this image was here: http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/6218/vgchartzpop.jpg )
The drop from 2009 to 2010 is pretty frightening, but after that it more or less evened out for 2 years,and it's now on a slight upturn. From September 2011 through January 2012, the forums averaged less than 1300 posts per day. Then it bumped up to 1450 posts per day up to April, and the average amount of posts has been 1750 ever since then.
Which, after all, amounts to an increase of 34%. For a site that's virtually only been decreasing for years now, that's pretty good!
The question, then, is what will happen in the future. With the site adding graph tools again (after for years only having been removing them), and a new generation of video games starting, I'd say it's looking pretty good.