The thing that strikes me is that if you go and visit the C/C++ forum you get (at time of writing) you see in the thread list precisely 5 threads. This is bad in itself. However THREE of those are stickies and one was MOVED to another forum! This holds true for many (most?) of the tech forums on VBF.

Go to 10 other top internet programming forums and you'll see that C/C++ are among the most active topics.

The reason for this is clear of course, the forum default view is threads from the last month... the forum software clearly isn't designed to show old and neglected forums in a good light. A newbie comes here to browse and spots that there has been practically zero traffic on a topic in the last month and they'll assume that their questions will never be answered because nobody frequents these pages.

I'm sure VBF is still generating a lot of hits and helps a few people every day. But it's obvious that there's nobody at the wheel.

My suggestion is to get one of your admins to alter the default views to show the last month's worth of threads (for popular forums that haven't died yet), and the last 100 threads no matter how old they are (for dead forums that get no new traffic like C/C++, C# etc...).

If people see many threads in the listings straight off the bat then they might be more likely to ask their questions here and thus we might claw back some traffic.