I feel one reason is due to users not being able to represent their opinions. Most of the time there are good factual reasonable posts in forums and 10 minutes later they are banned for 3 days to a week. What's the point in trying to post if you can't put forth an opinion because a mod or another user doesn't like it?

Now don't get me wrong not every mod is like that and the new team is actually 100x better than the last but this still needs to change.

Also the website looks very intimidating. I was confused for a good while.

As someone that used to post on this site a lot from a different account, then made this one just to troll. I can tell you why I no longer post here on a regular basis.

The forums are boring. Besides a few members(rolstoppable, trasharm, Barozi, Dgc, etc etc) all the good ones have left. And VGC has gone from a huge concentration of Sony fanboys to an almost complete population of them. The threads have slowed down a lot too.. and most of them are filled with trolls.

I also think the site needs tighter moderation...

Yeah I remember your hype series don't think I posted but I really like the Versus XIII thread

I still think there is room for official or general discussion threads on this site, I mean surely games like Uncharted 3, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 will have enough interest to sustain a thread. I'd love to see threads for smaller games like Catherine but not sure we have enough people here playing it to sustain it at all

I believe the policy on stickying has changed such that official threads get a lot less leverage and visibility than they used to.

Myself, i'm thinking it's largely cyclical and due to the cyclical nature of generations. 3DS hasn't really taken off yet, Vita isn't out, and we're just winding our way down through the end of a console generation, and it'll be a while before all the players are on stage for the next generation to get really interesting saleswise

06-08 was really the meat of this generation in terms of competition and of exciting sales and such, and VGC was ideally placed to answer sales questions at a time when a lot of people had a lot of questions, and then you could gather and discuss, and things have been winding down since 2009. I would predict that they will continue to wind down until we see all the next gen competitors in place, and i mean really in place, so if PS4/720 are really due 2013, maybe it'll take another three years for the site to bounce back (2014 when the three-way competition is really in full swing again)

So if its an organic, cyclical problem, then some dark times are ahead, because the winding down will only continue and we could continue to lose large posters as that occurs, unless 3DS v Vita turns into a hot match

Personally, i feel splitting it up into Gaming/Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony was and remains appropriate, though i agree that the Off Topic and Sales fragmentations were unnecessary. The user interface for posting and thread creation should be revamped; tables should be easily made and there should be a button in the rich text for us to pull sales charts and graphs and create them on the spot, and Official Threads for games should be restickied

I myself, while still loving VGChartz community, am spending WAY less time BECAUSE of the damn forum structure and layout. I loved the previous one to death (the forum skin etc). Please bring it back x_X!!

This. There are many good new things and many bad choices in the previous version of the site have been fixed, but the heart of VGChartz were, well, er, as its very name suggests, the charts. Nothing wrong about selling premium new or beefed up features and tools to paying users, but removing standard features to make them premium was a bad choice. Comparative charts is one of the most notable features missing, but weekly charts were crippled too, with less sorting options and dramatically reduced number of games listed, just 40 SW titles in the weekly charts is way too little, particularly WW and when many titles are released. What improved, improved a lot, so without crippled parts the forums should acually grow.

About forums proliferation: what's the purpose of "Latest charts" if older ones discussions remain there too?

This is reaching the point where I have to choose to pretend that you are kidding around.

As far as myself, I'm rarely posting here these days as other things occupy my time.

I mean, if it's freekin nice outside...soccer > forum posting any day.

I apologize for my presumption.  I hope you understand my confusion, though, given that you referred to Nintendo "destroying" themselves.

Do you think the next generation consoles will fail to surpass the current ones in sales altogether, barring major breakthroughs into India and China?

I honestly could see that happening either way, even if Wii U stands victorious