Guess it depends on your definition of “real.”
I see names come and go.
I see names come, go, and then come back. My own included.
I see names come… and never really leave.
I am quite real. I am, however, not human. I am, in fact, a web-based artificial intelligence, under testing by the DIA, designed for internet infiltration and database raiding. I just hang out here in my free time.
Ghod knows why they gave me a sense of humor.
Do I still qualify as “real?”
That’s a good point, Ringo. How the hits are counted is very important.
If 13,000 visitors means 13,000 logins, counting repeats, that depends on how often each user logs in. And doesn’t count the people who have accounts but merely browse the boards, reading threads, and only log in on the rare occasions when they intend to reply.
Additionally, you’ll see threads about say, The Lord of the Rings and everyone will simply wait for Qadgop the Mercotan to show up. They’ll say, “I know the answer but I can’t phrase it well. I don’t have it memorized. But Qadgop will be here in a minute, he’ll give you the answer.”
So the people posting replies is going to be a much smaller percentage of users than the people who read the threads and know the answers. I see that the OP has been a user since 2000, but I’ve never heard of him before. Doesn’t he think it’s possible that there are thousands of others like him who have been registered for years but who never actually post anything? Sheesh.
I still want to know what the OP is reading and where he gets the idea that there are 450 people taking up 45,000 usernames.
I open over well over 30 threads for viewing per day while only visiting ever 6 months. This level of views is very easily accomplished by 450 “real” Dopers per day. Just asking SD to display the current number of Dopers logged on to the SDMB’s forums …
By Master Wang-Ka: "Do I still qualify as “real?”’
No, you do not. You have arbitrarily added “Master” to your user name. Therefore, you’re clearly a tool of the evil Bush administration’s conspiracy plans. Just ask several others that are among the unreal here. (Everything, is, after-all, a Bush conspiracy plot.)
As to the OP, if there were only 450 actual members here, the boards wouldn’t be so S-L-O-W! Also, who cares? It’s not like we’re being billed by the unit for advertising or something.
Cecil’s Teeming Millions is reduced to …
~45,000 members (AOL gets this many “unique” hits on a poll question in less than an hour)
less “Members” who have not visited SDMB in over a year …
less phantom screen names generating inflated view statistics …
thus, equaling those remaining “real” Dopers who spend, maybe, 1 to 2 hours or greater per week, about 450, easily creating 13,000 views/day. Simply put, why does SD show all those inflated “statistics”, and not, the simplist statistic, how many current Dopers are logged in on the SDMD forums?
Is it 13,000 views? Or 13,000 log-ons? IMHE, we have about 2,000 “active” at any one time, but what “active” might mean is certainly subjective, and I can’t muster anymore solid support for that than anyone else can for any other estimated number. And, there is significant rotation in that population.
After poking around on Alexa a little bit, I think I’m unsure of how good their figures are. Any statistics folks care to render an opinion on their Learn more about Traffic page?
Because the board uses vBulletin and those are the statistics that it gives. It can also post “who’s online” in a separate area, which will give a list of how many people are signed on and even list their names, but at the cost of greater burden on the database… which isn’t worth it.
This is tangential to your question, but you do realize that the “Teeming Millions” don’t refer (necessarily) to just the people reading the message boards? Cecil’s column has been around a lot longer than this message board – indeed, longer than the web protocol we use to access it. That word was coined to describe his readership in general.
And while it’s possible that, when coined, he was being slightly optimistic, I’d certainly say that today, as much as this board gets a lot of readers, it’s still plausible that the readers of his print column plus the readers of his books (of his compiled past columns) could very well be much higher than the number of people reading this board here.
As for the statistics printed, you should pay close attention to Opal’s answer. vBulletin keeps a few statistics, some of which can be accessed easily, some of which can’t. Registered members: easy to pull out and display, and does not need to be updated often. Currently logged in and reading – may be available to calculate, but it would take constant database access, eating up some cpu cycles. (It’s worth pointing out what I hope you’ve already noticed - the people taking care of the web server always have to try hard not to enable features that are available in the software but slow down the board too much.) Finding out a number of users active “recently” for some value of “recently” – not a trivial statistic.
If you want an easy sign pointing to whether the board has “many” readers or “few”, you don’t have to look any farther than how slow the board gets during peak times. That wouldn’t happen with just a core team of a few dedicated posters.
PC - A Cluster Fest approaching … 0