My primary fears about the new subscription plan are that A) we’d get no new members, and B) not many old members would join. Only time can tell A, but I’m curious what percentage of the 7,000 active posters have already registered. Is this confidential information to a guest, albeit a longtime one?
The shorthand version is we had ~1,000 in the first half-day, 1,500 by 48 hours and were up to 2,005 as of Saturday morning. So ~25-30% of the purported 7,000 at this point.
See here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=246537
- Tamerlane
You can count them yourself here. Looks like about 2200-2300 right now.
I show 2,157 Charter Members right now. That does not include mods, admins, Perfect Masters, etc. Just a count from the showgroups page. Should be reasonably accurate.
A pretty easy way to count the amount of charter members is to go to the front page of the messageboard and click “View Forum Leaders”. When it opens, go to view source, and copy/paste the source code into Microsoft Word.
Push Ctrl + F to open the find dialog, and search for “Charter Member”. Highlight and delete everything above that point. Then, again using the Ctrl + F dialog, select the “replace” tab. Enter “member.php?” and leave the replace dialogue blank, and then push “replace all”. The number it gives you is the total number of subscribed users 
glad to see you kicked in the 5 smackers…
Using alterego’s method, I show 2543 Charter Members. Not bad. 
that was the ‘quick easy way’???
Well, compared to, say, travelling the world and asking everybody in it “Are you an SDMB Charter Member?”, yes …
Updated – we’ve just passed the 2,600 mark. 2600/7000 is about 37%.
Still have 16 days to go, too.
Nothing really complex there Do you know a faster way?
Alterego … your method works pretty well. It only takes a few minutes from beginning to end.
One thing that can cause trouble, though – for some reason, when I tried to capture the HTML using the View Code function, only about half of the HTML was captured (there must be a character limit). To get an accurate count, what I had to do was save the showgroups page as an HTML file to my desktop, then open that file in UltraEdit. Then I could do the count properly.
2607 charter members right now.
You can also go to the Forum Leaders view, highlight all the Charter Members, copy, Paste Special (Text) into Excel, delete the first column (which contains a web graphic and is therefore not properly pasted), sort, and then look at how many names are there.
I don’t know if this is faster or easier than your method in terms of the number of steps involved, but it may a bit more “intuitively obvious” from the standpoint that “view source” probably isn’t the first thing people think of. But then, you could argue that a lot of people probably have never used “paste special” either, so it could be just what we’re each used to.
WAG here, since I’ve done away with both IE and Notepad for a long time, but I believe IE uses Notepad to view HTML source code, and in Microsoft’s typical brain-damaged fashion, Notepad imposes a maximum character limit. There’s probably a way to force IE to use UltraEdit, but I wouldn’t know the details.
I’m using notepad as well. I’ve never heard of a character limit before. How many characters and what version OS are you using?
Well, I’ll be damned. I just dredged up IE and Notepad, and it swallows that entire page whole, on both my XP and 2000 machines. I coulda sworn that was one of the limitations that made me rather peeved at Notepad, but maybe I’m remembering wrong.
OK, I’m not nuts.
Greetings, Earthling 
Interesting article, seems to have jogged my memory a bit as I remember a limit in times past now too.
Unfortunately I have to add an update to my method. In addition to deleting everything above “Charter Member”, you will also have to delete everything below “SDSAB”. Since they were given complimentary accounts and in the end we just want to know how much money we’re making I don’t think they count (even though at least some of them paid, i don’t think we can know which ones).
So the current total is 2,629. Interestingly, I note that there are currently 114 subscribed users online, whereas a few days ago I marked 299. (time of day difference i’m sure)
My understanding is that they didn’t get complimentary accounts accross the board – just a few. Is there a thread about this I can read?