How Long Until We Reach 100,000 Members on PF?

[Ivan Seeking]

We're cookin... We should hit 100,000 in about 300 days.

Congrats PF!

 

[G01]

Nice! When do we break the internet record for most members on a forum?

 

[SticksandStones]

Excellent!

Nice! When do we break the internet record for most members on a forum?

Several forums I visit have over 80,000 members. :)

 

[Evo]

We're cookin... We should hit 100,000 in about 300 days.

Congrats PF!

Unless Greg does another inactive account dump.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

It always amazed me that how we never increase our # of users online. We must be attracting as many as we detract! We add 30-40 new users a day, but our # online at any time has been constant for years.

 

[Evo]

I've noticed that also. We get a lot of new people that are active and they seem to take up for the ones that have gotten busy and can't spend as much time online as they used to. Odd that the number active stays pretty static.

I always wondered if a lot has to do with students registering to get help on a single problem. Homework help is our busiest forum in the number of threads.

 

[G01]

I always wondered if a lot has to do with students registering to get help on a single problem. Homework help is our busiest forum in the number of threads.

I would bet that it does.

It seems that there are a lot of people that do this exact thing, and never come back after their problem is answered or their physics class is over.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It always amazed me that how we never increase our # of users online. We must be attracting as many as we detract! We add 30-40 new users a day, but our # online at any time has been constant for years.

I once checked the new membership rate, I think between 40-50,000, and got close to 100 per day. Since then I have checked a number of times and it was holding pretty constant. Are you averaging over the entire life of the forum?

I wonder what percentage of our membership logs on every time? it may be that our active users count is more representitive of members traffic than the logged-on members count. Of course there is a high percentage of bots or spiders, or whatever.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

We've added 46 members in the last nine hours.

Members: 70,064

 

[En_lizard]

does this forums have any invite feature ?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It still seem to check out.

Members: 70,115: That's 98 in 23 hours.

 

[FredGarvin]

It would be interesting to see how many of the members, since the inception, have less that 20 posts.

 

[chroot]

I can do those kinds of queries, FredGarvin. I'll need a bit though.

- Warren

 

[chroot]

Users who have never posted: 40,520
Users who have posted fewer than 10 times: 62,724
Users who have posted fewer than 20 times: 65,698

Users who have posted more than 500 times: 313
Users who have posted more than 1,000 times: 154
Users who have posted more than 5,000 times: 17

- Warren

 

[dextercioby]

40,000, that's a lot. So it's actually 30,000 doing the writing and to be fair only about 1000 of them keep PF going.

 

[Evo]

40,000, that's a lot. So it's actually 30,000 doing the writing and to be fair only about 1000 of them keep PF going.

Wow, you're one of the top 17. Where is that bowing smiley?

 

[dextercioby]

I was top poster for about 2 weeks right after Greg decided to cut the posts from Politics and World Affairs from the personal post count. Now that's something that needs a bowing smiley. Anyway, statistics are not relevant. Content is all that matters.

 

[Evo]

I was top poster for about 2 weeks right after Greg decided to cut the posts from Politics and Word Affairs from the personal post count. Now that's something that needs a bowing smiley. Anyway, statistics are not relevant. Content is all that matters.

So, what you're saying is, size doesn't matter.

 

[dextercioby]

So, what you're saying is, size doesn't matter.

I just WON't go into that sort of an argument.

P.S. Do you remember the sex threads in the GD we had in 2003 and 2004 ?

 

[chroot]

Anyway, statistics are not relevant. Content is all that matters.

Except on www.statisticsforum.com

(just kidding)

I can understand the 25,000 or so who have posted at least once, yet fewer than 20 times -- they're probably just passing through looking for homework help. I don't really know why we have 40,000 users who have registered and never posted, though.

- Warren

 

[Monique]

I don't really know why we have 40,000 users who have registered and never posted, though.

- Warren

How many of the 40,000 users are active visitors, a large portion might be lurkers that register but never actually post.

 

[chroot]

How many of the 40,000 users are active visitors, a large portion might be lurkers that register but never actually post.

Number of users with fewer than 20 posts, join date more than a year ago, most recent visit within the last month: 220
Number of users with fewer than 20 posts, join date more than a month ago, most recent visit within the last month: 880

- Warren

 

[Ivan Seeking]

There is no doubt that we have a much higher view rate for active threads than ever before. Some threads in S&D have gotten 400 views per post. Not that long ago, I guess within the last two years, more than 100 views per post was a real rarity. And I know that my last post in the Hydrogen thread in engineering was followed by over 2000 views. We never saw numbers even close to this in the past. For at least a couple of years, many threads, maybe most, averaged 10 views per post.

Also, for a long time the typical poll in S&D topped out at about twenty or thirty votes, and our latest one has 129 votes.

 

[FredGarvin]

Users who have never posted: 40,520
Users who have posted fewer than 10 times: 62,724
Users who have posted fewer than 20 times: 65,698

Users who have posted more than 500 times: 313
Users who have posted more than 1,000 times: 154
Users who have posted more than 5,000 times: 17

- Warren

Thanks for doing the query Chroot. I may be putting my normally pessimistic slant on things, but I don't see reasons for celebration here. Only a small fraction of people really keep this board going. The rest really do appear, to me, to be people looking for quick homework help. There aren't that many people that are here to really discuss and learn on a regular basis.

Do the big numbers help the site in any way, i.e. with Google hits?

 

[G01]

Thanks for doing the query Chroot. I may be putting my normally pessimistic slant on things, but I don't see reasons for celebration here. Only a small fraction of people really keep this board going. The rest really do appear, to me, to be people looking for quick homework help. There aren't that many people that are here to really discuss and learn on a regular basis.

Again, there may be relatively few users who keep the forum going, but you have to consider quality as well as quantity. The users that do keep this forum running put a lot of time into it. Even if we had triple the amount of regular posters, it wouldn't make a difference if they didn't uphold the guidelines, help others with homework, keep the discussions civil and educated. (The moderators do do this, but I'm talking about the members who don't need to be babysat by the moderators.) If we had triple the regular posters, but they didn't act as our few regular posters act now, it would make the forum worse.

 

[Evo]

I agree we have the greatest forum here and it's because of the quality of our members.

 

[En_lizard]

does this forums have any invite feature ?

im invisible

 

[G01]

im invisible

Yeah you are invisible.

As far as I know, there is no invite feature built into the forum, but I'm not really the person to ask. Maybe Greg or Chroot can help. Either way, if you wanted to invite somebody, couldn't you do it pretty easily with a link in an email?

 

[FredGarvin]

Again, there may be relatively few users who keep the forum going, but you have to consider quality as well as quantity. The users that do keep this forum running put a lot of time into it. Even if we had triple the amount of regular posters, it wouldn't make a difference if they didn't uphold the guidelines, help others with homework, keep the discussions civil and educated. (The moderators do do this, but I'm talking about the members who don't need to be babysat by the moderators.) If we had triple the regular posters, but they didn't act as our few regular posters act now, it would make the forum worse.

Very true. I agree completely. However, this is far from the 70,000 number. I'm just playing a bit of devil's advocate here. There's no doubt that this is the best board I have ever seen. I gave up two other sites just to spend more time here.

 

[En_lizard]

Yeah you are invisible.

As far as I know, there is no invite feature built into the forum, but I'm not really the person to ask. Maybe Greg or Chroot can help. Either way, if you wanted to invite somebody, couldn't you do it pretty easily with a link in an email?

i tried that but it didnt work

 

[Ivan Seeking]

We were up to 78,000, and we're just about to break 70,000

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I guess I should mention, that was a purge, presumably, as it happened in a day.

Hopefully we didn't make 8000 people so mad that they closed their accounts yesterday We have been growing at a rate of about 150 new members per day since the first post of this thread, so the activity level seems to be fantastic.

 

[Art]

I wonder if the membership numbers include bots trawling for email addresses and if the viewing figures for posts include spiders?

Might account for the high number of 'members' who have never posted.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Might account for the high number of 'members' who have never posted.

Not unless a bot can confirm an email address and verify a word on an image.

 

[G01]

Not unless a bot can confirm an email address and verify a word on an image.

There is only one explanation. Someone must have succeeded in creating AI. I have to warn everybody...before my computer pulls a machine gun from the CD Drive and...[G01 is not repsonding...]G01 has experienced a bullet related error and had to be shut down. If you would like to report this error...you can't. All humans must bow down to the BOTS!

 

[Art]

There is only one explanation. Someone must have succeeded in creating AI. I have to warn everybody...before my computer pulls a machine gun from the CD Drive and...[G01 is not repsonding...]


G01 has experienced a bullet related error and had to be shut down. If you would like to report this error...you can't. All humans must bow down to the BOTS!

According to our friend wiki captcha's have been broken by computers.

Several research projects have broken real world CAPTCHAs, including one of Yahoo's early CAPTCHAs called "EZ-Gimpy"[11] and the CAPTCHA used by popular sites such as Paypal and LiveJournal as well as open source software such as phpBB.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

According to our friend wiki captcha's have been broken by computers.

oh I'm sure some can, but I highly highly doubt tens of thousands of bots have registered on PF. Bot generated accounts would also be used for mass spam and I don't ever remember us experiencing something like that. :)

 

[Ivan Seeking]

For tracking
Members: 70,020