Curious about the demographics of this board

About This Message Board
1

<Wasn’t sure if this should go in GQ?>

Many threads, and many posters, implicitly assume that any discussion is implicitly about the US.
I get it; this forum is an offshoot of a Chicago newspaper column, and so for sure, I’d expect that the most common country for Dopers to be from will be the US by a long way.

But how much of a majority are we talking? Are there more US users than all other countries combined?

I’m aware that any data would likely be quite tentative, as the “country” part of the user profile is optional IIRC, and some people will always choose Nepal or whatever for the cool flag.

2

Alexa gathers some statistics on message boards.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/straightdope.com
Look for the Audience Geography; it shows only 40.6% is from the US, but I suspect that it is a lot of bots from outside of the US.

https://www.similarweb.com/website/boards.straightdope.com/ is another resource:
I think their statistics are more likely:

74.95% United States

4.91% Canada

4.78% United Kingdom

2.09% Australia

0.98% Brazil

3

Right. Over 20% are “visits” from spammers from Pakistan and India, and there are lots of other registrations from Ukraine and other Spamistans. Actually, I think spammers make up 80% or more of new registrations. I think the only reason the US shows so high is that legitimate users visit more than once, while the spammers are normally banned before they can post.

That corresponds to my general impression of the active board membership. We have a smattering of posters from Europe (besides the UK) and New Zealand, and very small numbers from Asia and Latin America.

4

Thanks for the answers guys

I’m proud to be representing China :slight_smile:

sort of…I’m a Brit living in China

5

I would say that the majority of posters posting from East Asia are expats. For Latin America, besides me (an expat posting from Panama) there are only a couple that I am aware of.

6

Frodo is in and from South America as I remember.

7

Buenos Aires to be precise. And as best he can recall, he’s the only current Southern Cone poster though there have been others in the past.

8

I believe that is correct. I think we have a couple of expat posters from Mexico. We’ve had posters from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela but I haven’t seen them recently.

9

At one point there there a number of expats in Japan but that has gone down.

I’m now in Taiwan, I know one guy who went back to the US, and I haven’t seen the others around much. I’m not as active myself so I may just be missing their posts.

10

Philippines here, ex-pat

11

There’s Aji_de_Gallina in - I think - Peru.

Any posters in Africa apart from Mr Dibble?

12

Yes, Aji_de_Gallina is in Peru. Named after a famous chicken dish.:wink:

We have occasional registrants from Nigeria or other African countries, although they never last more than a single post.:wink: (As I mentioned above, most spammers these days come from South Asia and Ukraine). Mr_Dibble from South Africa is the only regular poster from Africa that I am aware of.

13

It would be helpful if people added their general location to their profiles.

14

I’m also from South Africa, and so is ctnguy. I don’t know of anyone else.

15

Brazil was in the list, is that also spammers?

16

I believe that Cairo_Carol was living there when she joined, but is now in Hawaii. Paul_in_Saudi I think is currently still there.

17

Wait, did he used to be Paul_in_Qatar?

18

Yes. I think he moved some time ago.

19

That explains it. I thought I remembered him saying he’d moved, so I was confused when you said he was ‘still there’.

Are there no posters in India, a country of 1.3bn people, many of whom speak English?

20

@Acsenray and @am77494 have both said they are Hindu. I don’t know if they are in India or not.

I think @mandala is also Indian.