We’re colloquially called the “teeming millions”, but my feeling is that only about 6-10 people are actually posting here in a typical day. Of course, I’m well aware of confirmation bias, and I’m not asserting any factual basis for my feeling (other than always noticing the same poster names).
Is there a way to know how many people are regularly posting here?
You are way off. Even our quietest forums typically do better than that.
We get around 300 to 400 people posting per day, for a total of about 1200 to 1800 posts per day.
I’m happy to be wrong!
Thanks for that info!
FWIW, user visits is about 1,000 per day. Apparently a lot of folks visit but don’t post.
::waves hand:: Lurking has been a thing for a lot of us for a long time. When one is surrounded by people clearly smarter and more informed that you, the prudent thing is to shut up, pay attention, and learn.
Does this number count spammers and socks and others who who come in only to get immediately kicked to the cornfield?
Because when I read @Moriarty’s OP I agreed with him that it was a depressibgly low number – although I would’ve guessed it was more like 30 or 40 regular posters who post in any given the day.
I think part of it is that some forums are super active by comparison to others. I see thread games popping all the time, but it’s not something I participate in.
For myself, I visit several times a day, but probably post every other day on average: sometimes I’ll post to a thread I’m interested in repeatedly, but once I’ve said everything I can, it may be a couple of days before something catches my eye again.
You have to look at all the forums. I generally stay out of Thread Games, but there is a huge subset of posters I’ve never heard of playing Mafia around here. You can’t get a good number just reading MPSIMS and The Pit.
I take umbrage at that statement.
I may or may not be more informed than your goodself. But there are patently things which you know that I don’t. Why are you denying us access to that institutional knowledge? 
I don’t know how Discourse does its statistics, but I doubt it. Post that get caught in the spam filter don’t even show up on the user’s profile page unless we approve them (not everything that gets caught in the filter is actually spam). If we don’t approve them, the spam posts don’t show up anywhere except in the moderation queue.
They might count as visits, though. Not sure.
We get about 30 new threads per day.
For July, in a typical day, we had:
Site feedback: 0-1 new threads, anywhere from 1 to 30 new posts (varies a lot)
ATMB: 1-3 new threads, 2-50 new posts
Comments on Cecil’s Columns/Staff Reports: 0-1 new threads, 1-20 new posts
QZ: 0-1 new threads, 1-40 new posts
FQ: 2-10 new threads, 60-200 new posts
GD: 1-2 new threads, 5-100 new posts
P&E: 1-5 new threads, 60-400 new posts
CS: 3-10 new threads, 175-400 new posts
Game Room: 1-4 new threads, 60-140 new posts
Thread Games: 0-1 new threads, 90-250 new posts
IMHO: 3-15 new threads, 130-350 new posts
MPSIMS: 2-8 new threads, 150-400 new posts
BBQ Pit: 1-2 new threads, 60-300 new posts
You can keep an eye on the basic site statistics here: About - Straight Dope Message Board. You can also find it in the hamburger menu under About.
Scroll to the bottom. Users, I believe, are new members.
Thank you for this great site and the opportunity exchange thoughts on anything under the sun…& and above!
When did the SDMB peak and how many daily users did it have then?
Discourse barfed on some of the statistics (it doesn’t like reports with too much data over too long of a time period), but daily users who posted was about 200 per day in 2000 and peaked in 2003 at about 1,400-ish. It then dropped down to about 900 to 1,000 or so for several years, then peaked again in 2009 at about 1,100. From 2010 to 2022 it dropped slowly but steadily from about 1,000 per day down to about 400 per day.
Message boards in general have been declining since about 2010, so that’s no big surprise. We have done better than most. We’re still here, and a lot of other message boards have gone away.
Having visited here regularly since the early 2000’s, I’d estimate we have maybe 1/5 of the activity we did back then. Possibly a lot less.
ETA: read the above reply just now. My estimation seems to hold water, kinda.
Another long time lurker popping in. I’ve been reading the SDMB since probably right after the AOL switch and finally made an account I think in 2004 or 2005. I do post very occasionally, (once every 6 months or so), but mostly in CS or GR in lighter hearted threads.
However I do login and read pretty much every single day and read almost everything in P&E as well as GD and the Pit. I do peruse FQ, MPSIMS (mostly for big breaking news events), and IMHO as well but not nearly as frequently. I suspect my habits are not that unusual.
FWIW, I’m one of those who checks multiple times throughout the day, every day. I don’t post terribly often for a couple of reasons. Usually when I read something that makes me want to reply, if I continue reading the thread I find someone has already said what I would say. No need to make the hamsters work that hard, so I don’t reply. Second reason is that I share the sentiment expressed by @Lancia up above. Keeping my yap shut and reading what others have to offer is my preferred course of action.
If you click on your orange J, you can see your join date: Jan 4, 2001.
Ah ok. Never noticed that. Yeah 2001 sounds about right. Circa 2004 is probably when I actually posted for the first time.