I’m not a lurker. I’m more like 60/40 to 70/30 Poster/Thread Starter.
You?
I’ll go with 90/10 poster/thread starter.
95% lurker/4% poster/1% thread-starter.
97/3/0 would be my lurker/poster/thread starter ratio.
Hmm, just checked to see that I’ve posted just shy of 17,000 times.
Started 501 threads.
Lurked for a year or so before I joined and a year or so once when I inadvertently let my paid membership elapse.
So, that makes me 20% Lurker, 3% thread starter and 97% poster.
Somehow those numbers seem wrong.
Just consult Yogi Berra. He can work it out for you.
You’ve started 532 threads and posted 8930 times. I think your math is off.
C’mon, it’s the Straight Dope. You knew someone would look at the actual numbers.
Quite so. Okay, 95/5 Poster/Starter. And I should have checked for your very reason.
But I was going by feel, and it feels like I have started many more threads than that. The fact that a lot of them get few if any replies is what colors my perception, I guess.
Nice work on your part. Now, what math were you using on yours? 
About 2500 posts (damn, I didn’t think it was that many), about 50 threads started, but I lurked for a couple of years before I started posting.
So I went from 100% lurker to 98% poster, by my own infallable calculations 
I pretty much stand by my math. The 20% lurker would be for the 1-2 years I lurked, against the 7-8 years that I’ve actively posted.
When I said that those numbers didn’t “seem” right I was alluding to what you’ve mentioned. In reality, though, if we were starting threads that much more often than posting, it would indicate sort of “drive by” thread starting. By which I mean starting a thread, yet often not even posting in it again. There are a couple of posters (don’t recall names) that seemed to be at almost one thread started for every post. Sort of like starting fires then running away.
I’d be surprised to find a poster with a long history that could go over 20% threads started to posts. Even 10% would be a lot.
I’ve started 282 threads out of 11,457 posts, which is 2% of my total. As for lurking, I don’t know. I used to be in every thread on the board but that was years ago (my 750th post goes back to 02-21-2008, for a PPD average of 0.51 for the past year), and I didn’t post heavily in the beginning either, so I’ll just cut it down the middle and say it’s 48 L / 50 P / 2 OP.
I concur with your other comments and had a feeling the 20% was the Lurking Period.
You have raised a sort of challenge to tack on to the OP’s points.
Let’s hope the person will post to that effect, but if we can find somebody with a higher Thread Starting percentage than any previously posted, let’s see if we can find a winner in that area.
Not so much a game as to have to get it moved to the Game Room. Just a wee challenge sort of thing.
Any guesses who has that honor?
I thought of someone, and just checked him/her; they have a little less than 14% threads started to posts. I’ll wait and see if anyone else comes up with that poster, or if there is a higher number out there (in an older, established poster). I’m sure that there are some high ratios in folks that are new or not here long.
[bimbo Barbie]Math is hard![/bB]
Good point about the new folks, although the really new folks who plan on hanging around (and not piss in the soup) would tend either to lurk or to respond before wading out into the Thread Starting waters. At least that’s how I would guess.
Which forum is likely to produce the higher Starter/Poster ratio? CS, GD, IMHO, MPSIMS, GQ, Pit? Surely not Cecil’s stuff, right?
Don’t be bugged by the math. Guesswork is fine and it doesn’t even have to be accurate. See my boo-boo above. 
Hm, there may be a flaw in my system. I show you starting 750 threads, and posting (almost) 24,000 times (I’m rounding here so I don’t have to look again). Problem is that I think 750 might the upper bound return on a Search. So if you’ve created more threads than that, we might not be able to tell. I say this because the other high thread start poster I was thinking of also returned 750 threads started (with a lot fewer posts than Twicks). So this may be unknowable without GodMod level access.
I think you’re right about the 750 cutoff. I know I have to tamper with the variables to see further back than 30 pages when I do a plain vanilla search on my username. That only takes me about halfway back to my start date.
Is there not a place where you can see number of threads started as a raw number?
Run two searches, one ascending and the other descending, and find the median.
For what it’s worth, I ran an ascending search on twickster, and she has 750 threads from 08-19-2002 to 07-06-2006. Assuming a constant rate of threads started, she should hit 1,500 OPs in June of next year.
Thread starter, I think, though I’d be interested to see others’ opinions.