Does anyone have any idea or guess as to how many people are actually reading all this stuff? Specifically, how many of the counted members are active members vs. how many are lapsed, and how many of the views on a given thread are the same people coming back over and over again vs. how many are different people? On average, of course.
I believe, but could not swear to it, that the software keeps track, via the IP numbers, of which computers have already viewed a thread and does not add another View to the total if you go back again.
Re “active” vs. “lapsed” members, you’re active, I’m active, everybody’s active until for some reason the name is de-activated, either by banning or whatever. There are “active” members who registered in March 1999 and have made only one or two posts since then. (They’re just the strong silent types.)
As for how many people are actually reading this stuff, your guess is as good as mine. How popular do you wanna pretend we are? Okay, then, “the entire population of Planet Earth logs onto the Straight Dope Message Board at least once a day.” How’s that? It’s better than “the only people who log on are me, you, Cecil’s mother, and a group of Aussie opal miners in Coober Pedy.”
Bill H., took a snapshot of the member stats when that function was momentarily enabled on July 3rd. This measured total posts by poster and posts per day per poster. Here is his thread called Get your Most-Active-Posters here.
Duck Duck Goose:
Don’t swear to it. If you check the view count of a thread that is not getting any views, open the thread, then immediately close out and recheck the view count, it will have gone up by one.