Looking at my statistics - 1246 posts since I joined in 2003 - I suppose I would qualify as a “lurker” on this board. I attribute this to a variety of excuses but the primary reason is that, in most of the topics being discussed I feel out of my depth and could not able to contribute any meaningful information.
To compensate for my parasitic ways I opted to buy and maintain a membership. 
I would be heartbroken if the SDMB ever went away. I read the boards just about every day, the only exception being when we go away on vacation. For me, it’s easy to skim threads, but for some reason, I can’t seem to find the time to commit to posting. I used to post more frequently, but it was usually during the day at work, and I’m much busier there than I used to be.
(To take just one example, I started writing this reply earlier this afternoon, but haven’t been able to finish my reply and post it until now, after getting interrupted several times.)
Yeah, organizing your thoughts to post is sometimes a lot more work than just reading, especially if you have to look up cites. Some of us are still not the fastest typists in the world, either.
Agreed. I enjoy the active conversation here and really don’t want it to disappear. Where else I am going to geek out about music with fellow…geeks?
Sure, the Debates have gotten predictable, but there are plenty of other conversations to have. I have been laying low simply because work intrudes and my current client has a firewall that prevents me from posting.
If you go back to 2015, the MMP routinely was 6 or 7 pages (at 50 posts/page), sometimes rolling into the 8[sup]th[/sup] page.
Right now, on Sun morning, the current MMP is in the latter part of pg 4 & will probably get to pg 5 before being retired for a new one; which is typical anymore. That’s ≈ 100 less posts per week right there.
Going back to the OP: Do we know what is the precise definition of “active poster” as displayed on the home page?
As to the MMP mentioned just above … Speaking just for me I got turned off to it years ago by all the “I’m up, murph umph grumble.” posts. You could read the whole first page without much more content than 50 copies of “I survived the night and I hate mornings.” Yes, it’s the epitome of MPSIMS as MPSIMS. But some content would be nice too.
I just read the current one. It seems to have improved; fewer posters saying nothing, more posters saying something, banal though it may be. I think I’ll play tomorrow. Although it’ll be late morning because I’ve got to get going early.
Damn right, 'cause everyone knows it’s impossible to write something meaningful with an avatar next to your name.
I’d be happy to contribute more but threads like this put me right off.
My wholly unscientific inference from having run polls over the years is that there are more unregistered lurkers than registered ones. A fresh new poll will typically only average a bit more than one view per person (until the discussion heats up). Yet, if I compare thread views to votes, the former are still quite a bit larger than the latter, even for private polls where nobody will ever know the choice of a typical wallflower.
Hey, I joined in 2001, and this is post #757 for me. I am on the SDMB for about 2 to 3 hours per night. I find the analysis of current events is so much better than anything you get from a “traditional” news source. Also the humor and knowledge are unique, and I enjoy reading it. I will only contribute if I have a unique perspective on things, (maybe this post is an exception), but my areas of expertise are really narrow. I try to post whenever I see a thread about the Navy, and about aviation maintenance (the wheels of the plane have no drive mechanism people! Even if the treadmill is infinitely long, the plane will accelerate forward, while the wheels will spin twice as fast as normal). However, the site gets at least 30-40 page clicks from me per day, so I guess I am doing my part to keep the boards up, even if I average .13 posts per day. And, as someone said above, the pay to post was a killer, I pretty much left for years after that.
One problem I see is that there is not enough tolerance and support for newbies who may not understand the culture.
One example is when a newbie makes a post to a zombie thread. Many regulars will start making posts about zombie-this and zombie-that. A newbie is probably wondering WTF is going on and just leave. Or they feel like they’re getting pounced on and they leave.
Another thing is that there’s a lot of snark when a newbie asks an absurd question, but they don’t understand why the question is absurd. They may ask “why do clouds stay up?”, and there’s a lot of snark answers given. Again, the newbie may take it the wrong way and leave.
I think it would be better if people could have more understanding when responding to a newbie. Make them feel comfortable at first, so we can pounce on them later. Fatten them up so we can feast on them! 
Excellent points.
Also you have a significant number of long term posters, (even Charter members, paid up), who due to the fact that Warnings never go away, get banned*. Or perhaps due to the fact that they are a great guy, a real contributor but have a real bad month- and get banned. Or they get angry or quit due to some Warning that they feel is unjustified.
I know it happened to me. I was always a great supporter of the Staff here. Then I got a warning that I considered totally bogus- and complete with Circling the Wagons, the whole thing. Changed my attitude.
Are you ever like, going to let that go?
Indeed, that is my exact question.
How did it get there?
Or why they need the fat-headed, heavy-handed system of warnings at all…
I just looked where I am chief admin, and nearly all Infractions are set to expire after 10 days. * Obviously, wagging one’s finger and blathering pompously about feeble rules is a heady rush for any moderator; but it also wastes life. If you don’t want someone around, just ban them, not pile up paperwork Soviet-Style for earnest discussion…
Moderator Note
It’s perfectly valid to express this as a reason why someone might not post as much, so (although I disagree with DrDeth’s interpretation of things) it is on topic for the direction this thread has been taking.
That said, let’s not hijack the thread any further with this, so no more discussion of it within this thread, please.
I joined in June '06-and, after posting here and there for a few weeks, got annoyed with one Doper whose 2 reponses to my questions came across as rude and arrogant. I left for 3 months. I could have easily left for good at that point.
I used to post a lot more but a number of things have put me off and rather than try to change the board, I’ve largely just drifted off.
The Caesario thing where it took 3 months and God-Knows-How-Much hand-wringing about free-speech to ban a guy who was advocating sex with pre-toddlers all over the place. It cost us some good posters (Jodi, for one) while some people with fairly minor issues were banned on a second or third warning. Or (not naming names) the poster who’s MO was to start 1000 threads a day (hyperbole alert) that consisted of nothing but “Here’s a link to a highly biased political website. I think it’s good/bad. Discuss.” took years to ban…literally years. But someone like Spoon1 (the “MENU IS THE GOD OF ORDERING” crazy) was banned in a week or two despite sticking to the topic in one pit-thread. The priorities of mods (at least back then–there’s been some improvement) with regards to banning is just weird.
Any number of issues where absentee management decided to clomp over to the board to lay down some silly rules that “solved” non-existent problems (or one-time problems). Personally, that’s part of what changed the board from a community of people enjoying a party to customers at a McDonalds atmosphere for me.
The other part of what helped kill my “it’s a community” attitude was Pay-To-Post. A huge number of posters dropped off the Board and only about 1/3d to 1/2 ever came back (my guess, no data).
The crappy malware laden ads that have made it impossible to read the board on my iPad haven’t helped much either and I certainly don’t recommend threads to friends who might be interested any more because when their browser gets hijacked, I don’t want to have to fix it for the SDMB. I don’t object to ads, but the crappy malware provider the SDMB is using needs to be ditched in favor of, say, the much higher class of ads that run on warez and pr0n sites.
I’m still here, and I still post, but I’d guess my posting isn’t 1/10th of what it was in large part because of these issues.
Exactly. There’s a race to see who can post the quickest zombie snark as soon as a newbie resurrects a thread. If I was a newbie, I’d be annoyed and confused with reading several snarky brain responses until a mod comes in, locks the zombie, and requests a new one be started. Every message board has their own culture, on some, you never start a new thread if that topic has been covered in an existing thread. On others, it is a judgement call.