I'll give you another example, Massive Faggot:
If you go to the waybackmachine you can pick any instance of Sythe.org throughout the years. Was 2007 the most active year?
http://web.archive.org/web/20070406183039/http://sythe.org/
6th April, 2007 at 6:30pm: "Currently Active Users: 451 (167 members and 284 guests)"
http://web.archive.org/web/20081004170308/http://www.sythe.org/
4th October 2008 at 5pm: "Currently Active Users: 626 (177 members and 449 guests)"
http://web.archive.org/web/20090930202137/http://www.sythe.org/
30th September 2009 at 8pm: "Currently Active Users: 495 (124 members and 371 guests)"
Contrary to popular belief I have never changed the session duration. It should still be the vbulletin default which I believe is 30 minutes. The only thing that might have changed it was vbseo but I've never been clear on that. Even so, even if you halve our numbers during peakhour we're still doing comparably to then. If you assume the metric is the same, we're doing a lot better than then.
And I'll tell you one thing. The site takes a lot more to host these days than it did then.
What if I told you that 'sythe is dying' is really just code for 'I'm a butthurt/massive faggot'