In my experience from last year the lull will slowly alleviate in September and activity
should really start picking up in October. I'm not sure how true that will ring for us since the lull didn't really drag down forum activity as much as I feared it would, but that's the general trend.
Citizen Activity:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j7fEB5eQtTOLHb1tvW9tOygB3XtmQk0LtHCB-7U1lhQ/edit?usp=sharingThis is the spreadsheet I've been using to track Citizenship and activity since July, and based
this post off of. I'm planning on doing a more complete report next month, but the interesting thing to note is that while individual people are posting less, there are more people posting to make up for it which makes us a healthier community than we were back in July. Also, you can visually tell that the percentage of inactive nations (as seen in red) has dropped dramatically over the summer.
The private regional comparison I look at every month also echos this sentiment. For example, the percentage of posts by our top ten posters has dropped from 65% in June to 58% in September, suggesting that more people outside the top ten posters are posting. Our posts per member stats have gone from 31.77 in June to 41.8 this month, also suggesting that our post generation is growing faster than our membership, which I think suggests means we're doing a decent job at integration.
All the statistics I'm looking at show we're emerging from the summer lull with a good community foundation...it's just up to us to build on it going into the fall before the next lull, which will probably start during the holidays and continue until February.