I want to know how many people I have the potential to offend every time I put up a poorly considered post. How many Dopers are currently registered? Are non-posting Dopers ever culled?
Lots and lots, and no. I just checked the main page of the message board and it said “Registered Members: 15356”, and a new poster has just registered since I last checked.
I would dearly love to weed out the non-posting Dopers, but it upsets the server, and we all know that the server must be catered to in all things.
I don’t know how many unique hits we get per day, but we have a LOT of people who are just reading the board and don’t bother to register. So there’s a lot of people out there that you can offend! Don’t be shy!
Astroboy moons all of the easily offended people
Is everybody ready for a head-count?
I’ll start it off:
“One.”
(Okay, maybe a head-count isn’t such a great idea.)
Please don’t weed me out!
My question is, why is the number of registered members slightly lower than the highest user ID number? (In other words, when I posted this, there were 15359 registered members, but the latest registrant’s user ID was 15392.)
All I can think of is that the difference is the number of banned posters. But if so, that seems like a phenomenally small amount, all things considered.
[speculation]
Maybe the missing 33 aren’t registered members? (i.e. they are moderators/administrators)
Or maybe there’s some glitch whereby if you start to register, but don’t complete, the ID number is still ‘used’ even though it doesn’t appear in the database?
[/speculation]
Restaurant puns! Lynn, you break me up!!
It’s MySQL. When a record is deleted, its ID isn’t replaced (so there is always a unique ID), so I guess 33 users were deleted at one time or another, and when the next user signed up, it skipped the ID that was deleted.
Confused? 
I seem to recall a mod/admin telling us once that users are not culled for many reasons, perhaps the most important of which is that the usernames are registered.
Let’s say that some guy registers as “Spritle” and stays for a while. All female posters want him and all male posters want to be like him. He is loved everywhere he posts. Now let’s get hypothetical… he writes a mod and says that he won’t be posting ever again. Let’s pretend that the admin completely removes him from all records (username, ID, etc.). Now, many many lifetimes later, some butt-hole registers with the name “Spritle” and begins to offend everyone on the boards. This was made possible because the username was “freed up” when the first “Spritle” was removed.
By leaving all registered username in the database, repeats are damned unlikely. This is especiall important in case someone tries to register (unknowingly) with the name of a banned poster.
concrete alone makes up for like half of the missing 33, and if we count Oat Willie’s people, thats like another bajillion.
Maybe it’s a sign from God… 33 IS pretty significant in the Bible.
–Tim
Homer wrote:
Perhaps. But it’s much more significant on a bottle of Rolling Rock.
MySQL has many problems with the registered members. Sometimes changing member information causes a “skipping” too. On the UnaBoard, user number 7 is a “phantom” user. So I actually only have 123 members.
All Mods and Admins have legit ID #'s, like everybody else.
It really is small. Despite what some people say about us being so quick on the trigger, the number of people we’ve banned only amount to a drop in the bucket. And most of those names are people who had been banned once and tried to get back onto the board by secretly re-registering.
I wonder if the difference between number of registered members and ID numbers is a result of the switchover from UBB to vB.
I’m sure it was the metric conversion.
Disclaimer: Any likeness to the real Spritle is strictly coincidental in either example. 