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Forums grow, forums stagnate, and forums shrink. You can't change that, and I suspect if you try too hard to encourage people to participate, you're just going to make what you see as a problem even worse by driving people away.
TFP is a community, not a business. The users are not consumers and posts not product. Expectations of perpetual growth or even maintaining user numbers and use are unrealistic. While the site does cost money to run, and certainly it makes sense to maintain an income of some sort, the function of TFP is as a virtual meeting place for people first and foremost.
My suggestion? Leave it alone. As admin, it makes sense for you to keep an eye on the forum to make sure it's running correctly from a technical standpoint and maybe to police the occasional troublemaker. We appreciate that. It's not your job to grow the site. It's not your job to chew out members for not posting as much as they used to. It's really not your job to try and scare people into caring by throwing around words like "dead" and "death spiral down the drain". I'm frankly surprised you think that would work. If the TFP community wants to contribute and interact, that's what they'll do. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
I wonder what new members will think of reading this thread.
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