Hey, so I'm a newcomer when it comes to maple dev and wanted to share my outsider's perspective. RageZone is the go-to place for maple dev info / content, which makes the site appear first on google searches. That's cool and all, but sometimes I feel like I'm scavenging or trying to learn a lost art: a great chunk of posts were made in 2010~~2012, and the activity keeps dwindling as the years go by. Gladly, there are many helpful tutorials out there, however they have dead links / dead images, old versions of dependencies, etc.
In addition, I've found the community's aura not to be beginner friendly. Sometimes I see helpful tutorials get roasted by the first reply saying "nobody needs this". Well, it's trivial for someone in the scene, but it's needed information for someone who wants to start out. I've seen others say "this is not useful, because devs already know this and others just wanna leech". No, that's false. There are devs who don't know the maple dev ecosystem, but still wanna learn.
So, I kinda agree with what the others said regarding the reduction of contribution in RageZone: money is a big factor, it's an old game, people have moved on with their lifes. But also the forum itself doesn't look very inviting. I just take it for a dead forum which helps me a lot. I don't know if there are other lurkers like me who are in a similar situation, but it would be cool to see there are other people alive here. "Why contribute when nobody will read this?". The thing that motivates me to still pursue this is that I love the game, the private scene isn't dead yet (it has many times less players, but it's still 5000+) and there still are a few contributions here and there (RageZone, Z41N's youtube channel, etc). As well, it may be the case that the dev community has transitioned to Discord, but I'm not entirely sure.