Regarding the bias I'm sure all of us used to the site are aware of it and read reviews with a grain of salt. Don't misunderstand me - I really appreciate the valuable reviews - but if it says something like "absolutely fantastic" I rather read it like "very good". I don't really see it as a problem, but anyone believing the reviews are completely independent may be misled. The TDP reviews are very useful for making decisions between different pieces of reviewed gear, but (of course) less useful for comparisons with gear not reviewed here.

I have no idea about the overall site popularity, but it's obvious that the forum intensity has gone down (not only over the winter). A few years ago there could be pages of unread posts daily, but nowadays there can be days with hardly any new posts. I'm not sure why, but one of the reasons may be the heavy bias towards gear and tech stuff. Assuming that many have already acquired a set of gear they're happy with and are now trying to improve using it (i.e. trying to improve their artistic skills), the TDP forum is currently not the best place to go. Maybe some more focus towards creating images rather than the gear used for it would increase the interest. (An indicator of the rather low image creation interest is the assignment activity. Nowadays there are very few contributions both to the original assignment threads and to the weekly threads.)

Of course I understand that the contents of the forum is created by us that hang around here, and that any focus shift (yeah...) of the contents must be made by us. But maybe the site management could somehow encourage/stimulate increased interest in the resulting photographs. I believe that could be valuable not only for the forum, but for the entire site. I don't have any solution, and I don't even know if I'm on the right track with my speculations - these are only my thoughts on what could increase the interest in the site/forum.

PS. Being non-native English speaker makes me unaware of language nuances. That may make my way of expressing myself weird and even offensive to some. If so, it's absolutely not my intention - please read my English with a few grains of salt.