I generally see a (small, but perhaps steady) quality improvement in the last years, or at least a reduction of spam, the not-spam/spam ratio is going up at least for me. Let's face it: The "surplus" in posts we had in 2017-20 compared to now were in its majority spam posts. The "Bitcoin Discussion" forum was almost unusable, and now here and there interesting topics pop up, although there's still a lot of spam.

Regarding signature campaigns: For an advertiser, what's important is not the post count but the amount of potential readers. The Ad slot stats are not looking too positive but also not that bad. What has decreased is mostly the number of unique logged-in users (i.e. mostly "signature campaign participants"), while the number of unique logged-out users are growing at least since 2023, and also the impressions per slot are steady or slowly increasing.

Of course, I believe the forum's quality needs an even more significant boost if the decreasing trend in signature campaigns should be reverted. Everybody can contribute. It would also perhaps help to create "shareable" threads, i.e. threads with such high quality that you can share them at Reddit, X or whatever, attracting more potential readers. It would of course help if there was at least a slightly more beautiful theme. Perhaps the community can do some custom CSS and offer it to theymos?