Interesting questions......

& its a tough thing to figure out with any degree of accuracy due to the fact that people's usage changes.
When a "hot topic" is on the go and an individual is heavily involved in that topic then the time online can be almost non-stop....
I'd bet those that got tied up in the highly volatile political threads were most likely simply clicking the refresh tab every couple of minutes just waiting to vent their position yet again

On the other hand when its quiet then we all tend to get offline more and actually enjoy the real life



As to where people go.....
I frequent several other forums and I'm sure others do likewise be they sailing forums or forums related to the individuals other 'hobies', mine would be car and 4x4 forums for example.
Once the forums are dealt with then its time to run a closer eye over the FB groups purely incase I missed something



Mobile app for the forum ????
We did a trial on one of the car forums I run and we simply created a FB group with the same name as the forum, we then notified the members of the FB group and invited them to join.
Around 75% of active members joined up within a few days and the rest soon followed, there was however a few that flatly refused to join...... strangely enough they were the ones that had historically been the members that were the argumentative type in the 'political' style threads.
I guess that they didn't want their "real name" seen by those they'd pi$$ed off


The social side of the forum then moved rapidly to the FB group and the chitchat section on the forum died within weeks, for some that was bad and for others it was great.
The social side of the FB group improved member relationships dramatically to the point where social get-togethers have become an almost monthly event with a strong and increasing turnouts, something we struggled with when we only had the forum.
The tech side of the forum saw a drop off for around 8months but then recovered back to its usual rate of posts and now is heavily used on a daily basis

All up as an "experiment goes", we found the FB group IS an asset to the forum for the social side only..... when worked correctly the two work in harmony and are a compliment to each other.


would an app work here ???? perhaps if the front page was cleaned up a lot !
its too segmented at the moment and needs to be brought into much smaller groups that contain all the subsections ..... and that means a big overhaul for the forum