The lack of a Stickied Thread explaining the outage or at least acknowledging it was kind of a surprise to me.  VGC has been doing so much lately to make the site better and I just kind of expected some sort of post to let us all know what happened.  

I've certainly noticed this place is less active than when I last visited regularly. Lack of sales and most all users I like being gone are reasons why I also dropped off, I just came back for E3 specifically to see conference times, and back again now cause I wanted to talk about Fire Emblem Three Houses and see what others think of it. In my case it's not solely the fault of the site itself, I've become more of a recluse in general even online. Maybe I'll try to post more, but overall no idea what can be done to solve this. I've made some wild memories here good and bad so I'd rather not see this site die. D:

We can hope but I dun know, Switch is already out, and Project Scarlet has been confirmed but there's not nearly as much buzz about it compared to when we knew Switch as NX. I think both it and PS5 will be straight incremental upgrades which is fine, but will leave the gen feeling very similar to the last one.

It's only Tuesday!

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Definitely listed the site as being just Down, I mean... if it would load over a period of 10 minutes in the real world that is a site which is non functional.

There was a period where the site became fairly un-recommendable though in terms of reach-ability and simple design flaws when it came to a mobile version of the site, even with the current layout of site/adverts on mobile it's a tough recommend to others to come here to check something like a story or otherwise.

The way a site grows or shrinks when it comes to a forum is people wanting to come here and chat, something like a "bring a friend to wo..vgchartz day" might increase some traffic back through these doors? as long as the doors don't have a pop up covering the place where they would need to click create a new account it should work to get some new faces in here. What I mean by this is... if users of this site would spread it to others they know in the real world who might be interested in a gaming news forum which is fairly well moderated and has cool stories dropped on a daily here as well as sales figures... I'm sure we all know someone else who likes games right?

Given that the console wars really hit their peak in the 90's with the Genesis and SNES camps fighting it off, it is actually quite amazing to me that a website like this can still stake its existence on the idea of of brand loyalty and console sales in 2019. I think that it's amazing that the site is still going and is still fairly vibrant and that the concept of comparing console sales is even relevant today. There are so many things in the world that have changed since the 90's including with how we play games, but this basic concept of selling hardware units is still something that people can argue and debate over for hours.

It is a niche community and it will probably slowly diminish in numbers as time goes on but I see no reason why this site can't ride the wave down for many more years to come and still maintain a decent activity level.

I used a different site and it listed it as down as well.

https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/vgchartz.com.html

d21lewis had even made comments there in the past. :)

I accidentally let it try to load when I went to take a shower, and when I looked at my pc quite some time later, the front page had partially loaded. The entire right column ( hot topics, user reviews, weekly poll ) was missing. There may have been more, but I didn't scrutinize it that thoroughly.

So you think that a websites peak time to be about console wars was the 90s? at the middle of which there was around 44m people with internet access of any kind?

the number grew from 2010 > 2016 by 32x the number of people using the net in 1995 which was the death of the generation when you think the "console wars" had it's peak. Now obviously there was kids in playgrounds arguing how much cooler sonic was to mario... but that mostly lived and died in a school playground, from the ages of 12-15, adults didn't talk and argue about video games much in that era because there wasn't a means to have an adult conversation about gaming and brands for the majority of the world, so while console wars as a thing existed in the 90s it was actually a tiny portion of the population talking about it as a whole.

aye indeed, done the same thing, let it load in the background to see if there was a topic on why it was semi dead, half the icons loading down the middle of the page for articles but aye was dead for the main part, you can even see a history listing on the site you just linked.

those top 2 with 0 ping time... those don't mean that it's working super fast and has no lag... those mean the pings to the site never got answered.