or maybe:
4. nobody had the answer to your questions.

Portland Labs doesn't do support. They spend their time fixing bugs and adding stuff to the core. Stuff that many have impatiently been waiting for.

Korvin answers dozens of questions on Slack every day. Many dedicated community members like mlocati, johntheFish, cahuyea, deek, mrkdilkington, myq... to name a few do the same and also add code to the core.

And if memory serves you received plenty of help on many questions you had, here and on slack. If all it takes is for you to not receive answers to some of your questions right away to think the C5 community is dead I'd say you must be used to really really high standards.

Maybe then WP would indeed be more in line with your expectations and high standards.

With communication dispersed across many channels (slack, forums, stackoverflow ....and others.... ), it is inevitable that some will atrophy. There are simply not enough community members actively answering for questions to be reliably answered on all the places they come up. Atrophied communication channels reflect poorly on concrete5.

Slack is convenient and favoured by a core team members, so it gets more attention. It is also completely the wrong place for preserving knowledge or making knowledge googlable. Hence discussion on slack about mechanisms for preserving knowledge, making it googlable and better forums (discussion that will soon disappear in slack history).

I do agree that a search engine friendly Support Forum should be or appear to be based on the main C5 website. I understand that for more in-depth technical, developer discussions Slack is probably better as it may cut out the distraction of basic to mid-level support questions.

When support is required by most, the natural instinct is to go search and ask for help on the Concrete5 website support forum.

You, guys, seem to miss my point. I'm not whinging about unanswered questions. I'm stating an observation that the concrete5 community has gone compared to the days, say, 5 years ago where the forum was full of people, heaps of questions, heaps of answers and quick ones.

Now it's just 2-3 posts a day about installation. And because the documentation is pretty poor, the only option for help is, well, used to be, the forum, and now it's empty.

It's just a pity. I wish it was like on WP. So was I wondering if anything's being done on marketing the CMS and trying to increase the user numbers.

I don't think that the community is shrinking, it has much moved over to Slack where regularly questions and answers are thrown around.

Like JohntheFish stated, discussions there are not preserved and not visible to the outside world, which is why there is effort to move useful discussions to the surface of the forum.

Yeah, would you say it conicided with the move from 5.6 to 5.7?

We ended up with a nice new CMS, but I think we probably lost a large portion of the community. I understand why we had such a large change, it's great for the product, but I don't think it was great for market share.

The move to slack doesn't help because although it's great for live chat the answers are lost and don't go into Google, like they would on the forum.

@madesimplemedia is spot on with his comments about the change from 5.6 to 5.7.
We have witnessed the fragmentation of the community at every attempt to steer members away from this forum.
For me ... I do not like Slack it is just a confusion of chats, I rarely visit the StackOverflow pages and now spend much of my time here on the original forum where answers and questions are stored ready to be searched by our fellow members.

I feel the same. I abandoned C5 when it became impossible to install the later versions without any problems on a PHP7.X server.

The fact that some developers jumped ship in themes and plugins was a sign on the wall. I always preferred C5, but I can't offer the variety of solutions clients want these days. Just think of a e-commerce plugin or some really smart plugins that are available in the universe of Wordpress.

Look at the numbers just 95 themes for version 7+ and 460 themes for version 6? I've seen a few very good developers disappear. Furthermore marketing and attracting users is non existent. While in the WP universe new exciting ideas are developed like Elementor and Divi. I am not saying they are better but they offer so much more options and I can keep up with the new designs that are so common these days. Concrete5 looks more and more like a relic from the past.

I feel there is no options left for my own strategy then rebuilding old C5 sites for my clients in to WP sites. Because there is no way I can updates them without problems or support for the used themes.

It's a shame. But all good things come to an end.

The biggest problem with concrete5 is awful documentation and its partial non-existence of. Was it good, it would have avoided thousands of questions.

My ideal is Qt documentation, it's just awesome!

Wish Portland Labs made concrete5's good.

Also true. I was never able to solve the problem with install version 8 on a PHP7.x server. I got a lot of responses and ideas from other people but nothing helped. Where any other CMS and the older versions had no problems. I gave it up.

And like you said the lack of documentation. But also marketing to attract more users, more users results in more developers. Nobody wants to develop a plugin or theme when there are hardly and users to buy it.

I think to start with the first post, Concrete5 looks dead and hardly evolved. Thought the core it is still a great CMS and the idea of inline editing is copied by many.