So, for no clear and good reason other than I'm approaching my one year anniversary here and got curious, I am trying to get a better handle on what is included in some of the various numbers reported on the forum. There are numerous discrepancies and I know where some of them arise from, but I'm curious if one of the mods can explain things a bit better.
We are approaching 200,000 registered members. As of right now, there are 198,392 registered users. However, the most recent user's ID is 198536. The User IDs appear to start at 1, and so that means that, for some combination of reasons, there are 144 assigned User IDs that are not counted in the number of registered users. My guesses for reasons include people that have unregistered themselves (can people even do this?), people that have been kicked off, and people that have, for some reason, be reregistered with a new ID and their original ID is not being counted (perhaps someone that registered with an e-mail name and then the mods helped them get a different name?). Does that number (144) make sense to you mods and can you shed some light on the descrepancy? Does the total shown include people, like spammers, that have been banned?
Next, if I total up all of the post counts in the forums I get 551248. The main page claims 561907, a difference of 10,659. Now, I can easily believe that there are that many posts in admin/mod forums. But I could also believe that those forums have collected more than that many posts in the last ten years. So, could someone shed some light on the kinds of posts that are included in the main page totals that are not shown in the forum totals? Some ideas include admin/mod posts and deleted posts (spam and such).
Somewhat along the same lines, I know that posts to the Off-Topic forum do not count in a person's post totals. Are there any other types of posts, such as to those admin/mod forums, that aren't tallied, either?
I'm kinda curious about this last one because I got a wild hair that got me wondering how many users account for 50% of all posts. But I need to compare apples to apples. Based on what I currently understand, there are presently just shy of half a million tallied posts and the top page of posters (i.e., top 30) account for over 35% of them and the top 2 pages account for 46%. I estimate (haven't actually totalled them) that the top 100 posters account for right at 50% of all the tallied posts.
Now, this doesn't tell us anything that isn't common knowledge -- like most online forums a small fraction of members account for the lion's share of the activity. But it does underscore, particularly in the more Q&A-type forums, that a very large number of people with questions are being serviced by a quite small number of people. My rough guess is that, at any given time, probably about 20 to 30 members (the exact make-up, of course, ebbs and flows over time) account for half of the posts in those forum with the other half spread out among two or three thousand members (say over the course of a given month).
We are approaching 200,000 registered members. As of right now, there are 198,392 registered users. However, the most recent user's ID is 198536. The User IDs appear to start at 1, and so that means that, for some combination of reasons, there are 144 assigned User IDs that are not counted in the number of registered users. My guesses for reasons include people that have unregistered themselves (can people even do this?), people that have been kicked off, and people that have, for some reason, be reregistered with a new ID and their original ID is not being counted (perhaps someone that registered with an e-mail name and then the mods helped them get a different name?). Does that number (144) make sense to you mods and can you shed some light on the descrepancy? Does the total shown include people, like spammers, that have been banned?
Next, if I total up all of the post counts in the forums I get 551248. The main page claims 561907, a difference of 10,659. Now, I can easily believe that there are that many posts in admin/mod forums. But I could also believe that those forums have collected more than that many posts in the last ten years. So, could someone shed some light on the kinds of posts that are included in the main page totals that are not shown in the forum totals? Some ideas include admin/mod posts and deleted posts (spam and such).
Somewhat along the same lines, I know that posts to the Off-Topic forum do not count in a person's post totals. Are there any other types of posts, such as to those admin/mod forums, that aren't tallied, either?
I'm kinda curious about this last one because I got a wild hair that got me wondering how many users account for 50% of all posts. But I need to compare apples to apples. Based on what I currently understand, there are presently just shy of half a million tallied posts and the top page of posters (i.e., top 30) account for over 35% of them and the top 2 pages account for 46%. I estimate (haven't actually totalled them) that the top 100 posters account for right at 50% of all the tallied posts.
Now, this doesn't tell us anything that isn't common knowledge -- like most online forums a small fraction of members account for the lion's share of the activity. But it does underscore, particularly in the more Q&A-type forums, that a very large number of people with questions are being serviced by a quite small number of people. My rough guess is that, at any given time, probably about 20 to 30 members (the exact make-up, of course, ebbs and flows over time) account for half of the posts in those forum with the other half spread out among two or three thousand members (say over the course of a given month).