I offer the following in evidence, each of which by itself might not indicate anything, but taken together seem to point to a definite drop in sudoku interest, at least online.
I'm starting to see long-time sudoku Web sites being abandoned, or at least traffic dying down. The
Dutch sudoku forum is basically dead (almost no traffic this year, althought they're still accessible). Andrew Stuart has apparently left sudoku.org.uk (the site is still up), and I'm not sure what happened to Kate Mepham, who took her father's place when he passed away. It seems that development has stopped on a number of sudoku programs, and several sites have been temporarily or permanently unavailable.
Ruud is gone, leaving his own sites abandoned, along with several forums that he was moderator for (
Sudoku Players,
Sudoku Programmers, and
Sudoku Discussions). Spam is running unchecked in the first two, and my inquiries to the site admins regarding a new moderator have gone unanswered.
It seems that DJApe never visits his forums anymore (email and PM seem to be the only ways to contact him). His
Flower Sudoku and
Samurai Sudoku sites have been abandoned, and his postings to his regular blog site have dropped considerably (he went three weeks without posting a "Weekly Kakuro", for instance). The site seems now to be mainly about publicizing his e-books, and many of his previously posted puzzles are unavailable as a result.
Even traffic here is down from when Richard first opened these forums, although Richard and Jean-Christophe are still actively continuing development on their respective software, for which I'm grateful.
Thoughts, anyone?