Nah, last is the “never posted”, and before them, the “only posted once ever”. Each of those categories is about a third of our membership.
“Doable for a reasonably good reason” seems to be the current mod policy. Not done on a whim, but not impossible either.
Sorting that way, the people I don’t recognize when I start at the top are in Game Threads a lot. So that’s why they are unknown to me. I don’t do Game Threads; I even have the whole category muted.
I wonder if the mods know everyone or are also occasionally surprised? I mean, they are more thorough in their scanning of the posts so I suspect less gets by them.
Wow…2/3 of the SDMB membership has never posted or posted only once?! That’s really interesting (dunno why but interesting to me).
I imagine they at least know the people who frequently post in the categories they moderate.
Almost all of those aren’t “members” in a de facto sense, but are banned spammers, some of which got their lone posts put into the place beyond the cornfield (the void, as in it is totally wiped out of existence). Before Discourse I used to manually type in the latest member numbers of the last 24 hours when a bit bored-95% of them were spammers, 4% trocks.
Well, the last I saw statistics on it was a while ago, before we had a button to obliterate spammers entirely like that, and most of those phantom posters weren’t banned. But that figure of 1/3 each at 0 and 1 post has stayed remarkably stable over time.
This is a hijack, but I wonder whether mods really “patrol” their forums like real police driving around all day or are more like the fire department: sit around the fire station watching TV all day until the report-signal sounds and then they put down their coffee and respond to the scene of the post reports.
They’re cooking firehouse goat chili and pies.
I’m one of those that made an account and never posted. It was back in 2006. I logged in once, I think, only to finish setting up the account.
The logorrhea crew has a nice ring to it…
Oh. Well, I’ve seen a handful of those, they’re certainly here. Not as many as active lurkers who surface once every 10 years.
Well, we’re selected for our forums based on us generally spending a lot of time in them, anyway. And when we see a thread in one of our forums that looks like it’s likely to need attention (like something that looks likely to be intended for a different forum, or a political-adjacent topic in a non-political forum), we’ll read those even if we wouldn’t otherwise be interested. But we don’t read all of the threads in our forum. We do still depend a lot on reports.
So, the obvious question is, why? Why create an account if you didn’t intend to post? I’ve never understood that part.
Creating an account has lots of advantages for a dedicated lurker. The ability to track read status, receive notifications, and customize the look of the site are probably worth the trouble of creating an account.
That would only apply to people who are reading it fairly regularly, even if they never post. Accounts that are created but never again used are probably bots.
Yeah, that might be me too. I have been here for 21 years and have posted 1,100 times. That’s basically once per week.
But I am really not a lurker. It is just that I am 6-9 hours ahead of US time and by the time I see a new thread (of US origin) there are usually dozens if not hundreds of posts and there’s not much more I can add.
Never clicked on the hamburger before. Under Users, I was surprised to see I had norecognition of fully half of the top 10 posters. All in our own silos…
Wow, there are some oddities in that list. Like, the fifth-highest number of all-time views is someone who’s apparently never posted. And am I really the second-most-prolific poster?
I’m not sure about the accuracy, though, because there are some people whom I do recognize, that it lists as having way fewer posts than it should.
I did intend to post. Well, I intended to post exactly one question related to an assignment I was working on. I think I found the information somewhere else so I never asked the question here.
Back then, I barely even lurked here. I only read the threads I saw on the column’s site Threadspotting section.
The one I’ve run into lately are people who I’m wanting to welcome back only to see they’ve been oosting more frequently than I have.