Head count

How many........?

[Skylo]

I thought it might be interesting to see if anyone knows how many of us there are in the forums.
Calling Brett or any of the admins in the know.

[Brett_Tabke]

First, why would that information even be of value? I feel membership numbers are unimportant. We actually don't track numbers in that sense and I'd have to write something to know - (note: I'm a stats oriented person). I measure success by quality message counts and member feedback.

[Skylo]

I'm sorry if it is a stupid post. I agree that success should be measured by member feedback and the number of posts. I didn't mean it though to measure the success of WW. It is in my opinion the best place on the web to gain knowledge. I just thought it would be cool to note how many people have actually found their way here. I was reading an old thread about nationalities and found that quite interesting except for the fact that no South Africans posted:(

[Paul in South Africa]

This South African does every now and again :)

[Brett_Tabke]

No, not a stupid post at all. It is quite a common question and I've never figured out why people feel that stat is of value.

[mole]

Bit like telling people the number of raw hits one's site gets "I get a million hits an hour!"

- it's usually a big number, which one feels might impress someone if you're boasting about things.

[Skylo]

"- it's usually a big number, which one feels might impress someone if you're boasting about things." No boasting here even though we are the biggest and the best forums around;-)

[deejay]

gawd I'm having the hardest time restraining myself here... such an opening for jokes about the size of one's membership. :) I'll be good... promise.

Suffice to say the number would be irrelevant.

I know of at least one forum that numbers its registered members at somewhere over five figures... primarily because they require registration to access most of the site. Better than 90% of those registrations never make a single post. The ACTIVE membership, however, comes down to no more than about 100-200, and the quality of posting (or lack of)and 'closed shop' atmosphere of the members ensures that figure won't increase in a hurry.

The number means nothing. Looks hellishly impressive on the homepage though.

[creative craig]

I was figuring on 150-200k views a day, and 10k active members that it would handle easily. We've beat that 6 fold some days this spring. (yep - 3 days over a mil page views recently).

This was posted by Brett in a thread a couple of weeks ago, it shows what he was expecting, gives no real scale to the actual amount I would imagine :)

Craig

[DaveN]

It is quite a common question and I've never figured out why people feel that stat is of value

it's the feeling of belonging :

I live in a city with XXXXX many People
I Watch football with XXXXX many People
There was XXXXX at the Rock Concert i went to.

Dave
membership number XXXXX

[georgeek]

I was wondering the same thing when I saw the Ovusoft Forum went over a million posts a few weeks ago.

I have found that the accumulation of statistics apparently regarded as unnecessary by others is often a precursor to insight, but maybe that's just me. :)

[chris_f]

Google say 1,620 but I think that's very low. See here [google.com]

Chris

[Skylo]

Huh should we be optimising for that first place;-)
That does seem quite low.
Nice lateral thinking to find that though.
Maybe we could do like a role call. Everyone could go through them and find their name.
Search within results everyone!

[Skylo]

Scratch that I idea.
I don't come up oh well!

[DaveN]

try this [google.com]

dave

[trillianjedi]

What a clever lateral thinker you are Dave.

66,000 odd is more like it.

But as someone else mentioned, probably more like 100-200 actual *active* posters.

It's not a stat that's useful for anything, but it does satisfy curiousity.

TJ

[DaveN]

I always use google to do my site searchs it leaves more processing power here.

<sidenote> it was alot easier when google cached the pages

DaveN

[korkus2000]

Here is a count from a year ago.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[creative craig]

In that post I made Brett said he was planning on around 10,000 active members and around 150K - 200K page views a day.

Instead they got around a million views in three days at the peak of traffic (dominic update time I think), that was the time when the footer at the bottom of the active page was abit of a mess and wouldnt show up correctly.

Craig

[Brett_Tabke]

>Google say 1,620 but I think that's very low.

Only members with over 100 posts get indexed - stops profile link dropping.

[mil2k]

probably more like 100-200 actual *active* posters

In the first search of 1,620 i went through the results and i recognized more than 300 active posters.