Interestingly I made that poll on the right almost exactly 2 years ago.
It's a lot of effort to maintain this site unlike other sites I'm a mod/admin for. The tools are just not there. Also hardly anyone is here and it's pretty demotivating. I can make an announcement on another site and literally thousands of people will acknowledge it and it was far less work to do so.
Also the time required to investigate downloads etc is kind of a pain in the ass.
This site needs a revamp and it needs users. It's one thing to say "If I were an admin I'd do this and this and this", but you'll be burned out in a month... 3 max.
Just my 2 cents as someone who has been on this site since before my official registration in 2002 and at one point was very active in the Community.
Nostalgia is powering it now; nostalgia and stubbornness.
thinking is like pong, it's easy, but you miss sometimes.
I once offered to update/revamp/maintain the website years ago, but no one seemed willing to grant access to the code and/or database. Then it was "updated" and nothing really changed.
I would go so far as to say the entire site needs a complete reset now (oddly enough the last thing I posted about 3 years ago). Just remake the whole bloody thing from scratch.
It saddens me every time I come back to lurk, and see a whole lot of nothing.
I share the sentiment. Most of the once-active members have just moved on to other things. I'd love to be able to consciously block out time to work on a game, but most of it is reserved for Photoshop, composing music, and gardening. Goodness, it's so weird to think that I joined as an uninitiated highschool hyperboob in 2008, and now I've been a registered member for over half of TDC's existence. I'm in college now.
It's hard not to miss the times that this place was more active, having practically grown up with the site and the community. I remember the Arcade, the competitions, and not being able to make games that were remotely fun or well constructed. Having the time to chat with better-minded folks, challenge others on the Arcade, and make those inglorious attempts at games was quite a beautiful thing. The last MMF2 project I started and dropped was last year, after a brief bout of inspiration and nostalgia in which I had forgotten to routinely worry about my finite life.
It's really great to see folks you were familiar with not 5 years ago releasing games on Newgrounds, Steam, Kickstarter, etc. though! Whether or not TDC rebounds, and I hope it does, it has certainly been a launching platform for developers, so it certainly won't be without a legacy. Still, it would be awesome to see a big collaborative effort spearheaded by the community and released on Steam in an effort to bring TDC back in focus. I guess, if there are official plans for something like that, I don't currently mind re-integrating and providing some sprites or composing some music.
Sadly, many people have moved to Construct 2 and Unity. It's not a bad thing but it just made this forum kind of lonely since this used to be the place to discuss MMF and TGF related stuff.
I remember eagerly participating in compos, discussing games and "woah"-ing at every game with cool art style and unique mechanisms on the download page.
I'm not sure if this site should reboot as a global game-dev site or not, but maybe changing the layout and making things easier to manage might help.
As far as I ever knew, this site has never been explicitly about Clickteam products. Maybe it was before my time, but while I was here it was always software agnostic, although primarily about clickteam products. There was always community animosity towards other game making software, but you weren't prohibited from using, posting games, or asking questions, for other software.
It's pretty sad that I do want to make stuff still but at the same time can't be bothered to put the effort in. I think it's related to the slow death of TDC in a way, because the first thing I would do after making a game was to post it here.
I'm not sure there are any other communities out there simply because people don't use forums anymore. They all use Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. etc.