First of all, let me say this: If the staff members didn't care for this place/were not motivated, as some people in here accuse of us, this place wouldn't exist anymore. It would have vanished a long time ago. Secondly, as Ito said, we are not a cooperation. We are a bunch of friends that donate some of their free time to work on this site. For me it's a hobby, a hobby that I have been doing for, I dunno, 5 years now? Since we are not a cooperation, we are not in the business of "hiring & firing" people, ie. hiring new people when they are active, and kick them again as soon as their "perfomance" drops. I am an admin, but I don't want to be the "boss" of a bunch of ever-rotating mods that get "laid off" if their performance has dropped for a month or two. If that's what people expect me to do, then frankly, I don't want this position anymore. I want to work in a team with people I like and trust and have a good time. That is somewhat inefficient, but there is more at issue here than "efficency" and "perfomance". And for better or worse, in the end we have always removed inactive mods, usually quietly, and usually after giving them a good benefit of doubt. Now, let's put some things into perspective. There seems to be a general consensus that activity on the forum is in an overall decline. Some even say that the forum is "dead" or "dying". Objectively, this isn't true. For reference, here are some statistics for monthly new posts and new topics of the last 1.5 years.
As you can see, there have always been fluctuations, but there is no general trend towards less activity. I know statistics aren't everything, besides quantity there is also quality, but it's an interesting fact anyway.
In these 18 months a lot of stuff has happened. Naturally, in some periods the staff was more active than in other periods. Contests were held, staff members have been added or replaced, the staff invested some good amount of money into a whole new forum software to freshen things up, the forum structure was reorganized and so forth. There doesn't seem to be any direct correlation between staff activity and overall forum activity, neither positive or negative. That's not to say that staff activity is completely irrelevant or that staff members shouldn't be active. But you cannot expect any miracles here from any new staff we may add, or increased activity of existing staff.
There are some other issues I want to adress at some later point.