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Forum: AI era of the forum

In November 2022, when ChatGPT was launched, Stack Overflow was still receiving 108,000 questions per month. By December 2025, that number had dropped to 3,862—a volume not seen since 2009, when the site had only been around for a few months (see).

Do we have any idea how does the "pattern" looks like for the biostars forum ?

Are we less affected?

ia
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updated by lauraashaley • lauraashaley • written by Juke34 Juke34

1 answer

At this point no knowledge forums are unaffected by AI (I assume you mean that when you write IA) and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Istvan Albert may be able to dive into the usage stats as the admin, but looking at things in general the number of new questions has seen a significant drop compared to last year. Real user number may be difficult to tease out because of all the AI bots that were plaguing the site a few weeks back. 500-600 ish unique users per hour seen now is likely true usage reflection. That number is about half of what it used to be (before AI), if I recall right. It does mean that a significant number of real people still visit the site regularly.

In general, it is not a bad thing since "low hanging fruit" questions are easily tackled by AI (we have not seen any "how to reformat fasta headers" questions recently). Even some of the more complex questions can also be answered by AI, based on the "knowledge" AI "learned" from biostars user contributions on this forum.

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written by GenoMax GenoMax

Along similar lines, do you observe many queries where someone needs help digging themselves out of some hole their LLM dug? A shaky analysis strategy based on hallucinatory advice, vibe-coded tools with fundamental problems, that sort of thing?

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written by sholt6 • sholt6

Right IA was in French ^^ Thank you for your feedback. I didn’t realize that it can be difficile to differentiate if a users is a bot or not. It would be interesting to know the part of bot that is user of biostars

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written by Juke34 Juke34

I didn’t realize that it can be difficile to differentiate if a users is a bot or not.

It was the case a few weeks back when the site was under the periodic AI bot siege (at that time biostars had 14K+ supposedly unique users per hr, making the site unusable for real people). Since then measures have been put in place by Biostars owner (screening for bots) that appears to have stopped them (for now at least). So it may be safe to assume that current user numbers (shown in the footer) are real visitors.

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written by GenoMax GenoMax

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