There are currently three threads that dance around the topic of how many active posters are there.
How many “real” Dopers are there?
Factually, how many SD members have more than 1000 posts?
SDMB has 44,000 members and 20,000 readers, so why the…
This question comes up quite frequently as a matter of fact. kabbes took a mathematical approach and came up with kabbes Hypothesis. IIRC, this led to a guesstimate that at any one time about 10 percent of the registered posters are active posters. As of this writing there are 44,605 registered users. kabbes Hypothesis would lead to a count of about 4500 regular posters.
In a couple of the above threads it’s been postulated that there are only about 450 active posters. This seemed ludicrously low to me. Suggestions for the SDMB staff to run SQL queries to obtain an answer goes begging for lack of time and priority. So I decided to gather some data.
Using the link* in the “Replies” column in each forum, I captured the people who had posted in the threads that were on the front page of each of the forums, during the hour between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. CST on March 11, 2004. I copied these names into Excel, sorted them, and eliminated the duplicates.
The usernames range from 11811 to Zyada. And the total number of distinct usernames that have posted to the threads that were only on the front page of each forum, was…
…(drum roll please)…
… 2174.
Interestingly, as I scan the list of usernames it looks pretty comprehensive. More complete than I would’ve speculated. Clearly though, there is no way I could possible recall all the usernames that I’ve run across to notice whether or not they were missing. (Though I do notice that Atomic Badger Racing is not present. Mangetout’s constant hawking of this name apparently made an indelible impression.)
So then, here is Algernon’s Conjecture: I speculate that this count of posters in the threads that are on the front page for this one hour of one day is between 1/2 and 2/3 of the posters that regularly post. Therefore I arrive at a count of roughly between 3000 and 4500 regular posters.
- Note to Mods: I did some experimenting prior to using this link to see if it appeared to be server intensive. But the info must be quite easy to retrieve because the response time was extraordinarily fast.