Does anyone know of any meaningful way to represent how many posters are how active in which forums?
I imagine there is a lot of selection going on, such that I seem to most frequently run into a somewhat limited number of posters. I imagine we are interested in the same sort of threads in the same forums. And maybe we are drawn to threads we see they’ve posted in. I imagine I’m simply not aware of great numbers of folk who participate in these boards in ways other than I do. But recently, my personal experience has been that I’ve been communicating with a smaller and smaller number of people here.
You can see in the stats how many logged in users, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the number of users who are interacting with the board. I would guess there’s some sort of statistical distribution where some small percentage of users contribute a lot of posts, while other users post just occasionally. I agree that it seems like there is a smaller and smaller group of participating posters. That may be a side effect of declining message board population in general.
You can see for yourself how the stats have changed over time by going to a web archiving site like archive.org. Here’s the link for the SDMB: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/index.php It looks like the older version of the board didn’t show the active members on the front page, but some of the later ones do. Here’s the stats from 2011:
Threads: 590,145, Posts: 13,954,506, Members: 119,143, Active Members: 10,731
If the statistical distribution is consistent, I would expect the board to feel 1/3 as active as it did back then since there are 1/3 less active posters. But there could be other compounding factors which make it even less so. Now there are many more places for similar discussions, so people may be splitting their participation among many boards. In 2011 maybe someone had 100% of their participation on the SDMB, but now they split it between SDMB, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Thanks for the #s, but what do they mean? What is an “active member”? And - as filmore suggests, I doubt all active members are equally active. And certainly not across all forums.
Unless the Admin can generate a report on it, you’d probably have to guesstimate based on the posts in Today’s Posts. If you check about the same time every day, you could keep a spreadsheet listing who posted where and how often. Take a little sweat and elbow grease, though, but it could be scripted.
While we are talking about user info, at one point there was a list of users sorted by number of posts. I can’t find it anymore. Is it still available?
For individual threads, clicking on the “Replies” link to the right of the thread title will show how many replies each person has in that thread. I’m not sure I’ve seen a listing of users and their posts in a global sense. The closest thing I know is to click on their profile and look in the statistics area.
This could probably be done right now since you can go back in time for any of the forums. Go to the main forum page and there are links to back to previous pages. You may have change the time range at the bottom in order to see the full history.
As I was looking back at the previous pages, I noticed that threads on each page covered a smaller date range as I went back in time. Here’s some quick numbers:
2019: 15 days
2016: 10
2013: 5
2010: 5
2017: 5
What those numbers mean is that of the 150 threads I see on a page, that’s how many days are different between the last posting date for the threads on the page. So in 2019, the listing covers 15 days on a single page, in 2016 it covers 10 days, and so on. My thinking is that the more participation, the more threads will be active at any given time. The smaller the date range, the more participation I would expect since more threads are being kept current. The larger the date range, the less participation I would expect since fewer threads are being kept current at any time. I would not be surprised if the board participation is 1/3rd of what it was 5-10 years ago.
But this doesn’t necessarily tell you how many people were participating. Maybe back in 2013 there were a few people posting in lots of different threads which is skewing the results. But if things are statistically proportional, I would expect the change in date range to inversely track with the change in participation.
An active user, according to vB 3, is someone who visited and logged in in the past 30 days. This includes new users and spammers.
Of the 3,412 users who are “active” at the time of this post, about 300 to 400 will be new users, give or take. Click on the “Welcome to our newest member, ” link, and work your way back through user numbers. Many new member profiles will be suspicious or spammy. For many others, “you do not have permission to access this page”. The last 12 members to sign up don’t have visible profiles, which probably means they’re banned.
So, we’re down to 3,000 real active users in the past 30 days, give or take. If you apply the Pareto principle – 20% of the members are responsible for 80% of the posts – there’s 600 really active members. If you apply the 1–9–90 rule to the SDMB, there’s only been about 2,000 members who were “active”, posting more than once or twice, over the history of the SDMB. (The SDMB supposedly doesn’t cull zero-post members or spammers. Some message boards have strict new member screening – Stop Forum Spam, email address and member name keyword blocking, country or CIDR range blocking, etc. – or cull zero-post members, so you can’t really apply the 1-9-90 principle everywhere online.)
