True, but we had a mass exodus because of P2P.
To quote Tars Tarkas: I will be leaving
A search of threads from that time shows a lot of people left because of the decision.
I’m not judging or throwing blame, simply stating a fact.
I’m going to wait for the movie version. We can have a drinking game based on the number times we hear the word “ontological”.
Clam Chowder
If you set your profile to add subscription when you post in a thread, it helps find thread you’ve contributed to. And as suggested above, you can use Thread Tools to add a subscription to any thread you want to follow. You can also set your preferences for how many threads you show, so older threads stay visible for longer.
I doubt that many of the people who left at that time would still be posting now, seven years later, even if the policy had never been implemented. The half-life of a poster here is not that long. Certainly we lost some posters then who have never returned even though the board is now free again; but the impact on the overall composition of the board at this late date is trivial.
He was not.
Not in my experience. 
I just realized that the second part of my post was meant for a different thread altogether. :smack:
Oy.
I don’t get it.
Yes, you do.
I hope I don’t get it.
Is it catching?
Never happened to me.
I don’t know about that. There is some truth to people moving on, finding other things, but how many active posters do you see running around as Charter Members? How many more could have been if they’d wanted to? How many have join dates in 1999?
I’m certainly one who left during P2P - I may have posted a handful of times with my “freebies” - but came back later. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly coincidental with P2P going away, but that was a factor.
Dio has been accused of contrarianism in debate and they are mocking this attribute here.
Yeah, me too. I did a few searches on his real name for a while after he stopped posting, but to no avail. I liked him a lot. Also, he didn’t respond to emails to his public address in his profile here, or the one he used when we had an off-board correspondence.
Those who considered the board of special interest to themselves mostly either paid up when it went P2P, or came back when it went free again. We may have lost a certain percentage of people when things went P2P, but those people were (for the most part) those who were less committed and thus less likely to still be posting seven years later, whether the board was free or not.
I always wondered what happened to Mr.Cynical…also, I miss Satan
Where are you getting that information? As far as I can tell, no exit surveys were done and there hasn’t been any sort of mass poster investigation to determine board loyalty vis a vis wallet thickness.
I don’t think there’s enough info to state categorically one way or the other whether we lost a critical amount of people in P2P. (Although, of course, I lost no one, having not even found the board until 2003-4ish.) But I also question the idea that the poster half life is less than 7 years. If you exclude spambots, trolls, and google necromancers, I think the half life is probably quite respectable.
Me, me!
ahem.
Sorry, carry on.
It’s simply my impression, having been through that period.
I’m certain it’s way way less. We get dozens of new registrations every day, yet the number of active members (those who have logged on in the past 60 days) is currently about 7,000.
There are a (relative to the entire membership) small number of posters who continue to post for many years. But a large majority of registrants either never post, or post only a few times.