This post holds four hundred characters (four hundred and eighty-two including spaces).
IIRC, something like a third of all registered members of the board have no posts at all, and over half have a maximum of one post. Thus, the median number of posts per user is 1, and the mode is 0 (though the mean is about 136).
Of course, a question like “what proportion of randomly-selected posters get banned” depends on how you define “randomly-selected”. You could select posters uniformly from the set of all SDMB members, in which case the folks who make only zero or one posts are extremely relevant, but nobody really cares much about them. The better question is probably predicated on choosing posters from a distribution weighted by the number of posts that poster has. Which would work out to be equivalent to the question asked earlier in the thread, of what proportion of posts were authored by a now-banned poster.
Oh, and incidentally, we hit 12 million posts some time between when I opened this thread and now.
feels the need to post a third time just because
I do think that the important thing is how many great people never get banned, post daily, and fill our days with joy - or at least some modicum of entertainment.
toddles off to bed
I’d say the overwhelming majority of posters that I’ve banned have made precisely one post. Spam, of course.
Sure, why not. Keep buying tickets to this lottery.
ETA: Darnit, I just did so myself. Fooled.
Algernon, I think. No comment on his geekiness.
This might be the thread you’re remembering.
EDIT: Or maybe you’re remembering Earthling and his Life, Death, and Exile (SDMB stats, extremely long)…
Were posts like that common back in the old days, Grampa? 'Cause if so, wow.
Great work finding these. My specific thread I remembered was Useless SDMB Statistics (and long, too) - About This Message Board - Straight Dope Message Board
GET OFF OF MY LAWN!
kabbes was a third poster that did a lot of research on posters and patterns. Quite impressive stuff. I did keep some very primitive lists of high-post-count users, but their analyses were on another level. If I recall correctly they were asked to stop what they were doing because of concerns about board performance, but I can’t find that post.
If it’s any consolation to you, the two who started these threads (linked from the above threads) are banned:
Factually, how many SD members have more than 1,000 posts?
How many “real” Dopers are there?
Looks like the odds of a poster who asks such questions being banned seems higher than the odds of a random poster being banned 