How many active members?

Some recent posts had mentioned that the number of registered users on Tiki Central was approaching 6000. This got me thinking and wondering - how many people are currently active on Tiki Central. This led to an obsessive-compulsive gene to kick in, and I spent several hours going through the member list, trying to get a better feel for who our community is.

I went to the Member List, and decided to count how many of the registered users were active and still posting. I used the following criteria to define an active user.

1. They had to average at least one post a week since joining.
2. They had to post at least once in the last three months.

I could have used different criteria, but I had to draw the line somewhere. I did nothing concerning the length or quality of one's post. A new member who joined last moth and has posted just 10 members is counted as a single active user, just as is the person who has contributed thousands of messages over the years.

I also ignored participation in the Tiki Shout chat room.

After examining all 120 pages of user names, here are my final numbers, and a few observations.

A. There are approximately 280 people active users, who meet both of the above criteria.

B. There are approximately 60 people who don't meet the above criteria, but are listed as being Grand Members ..... these are probably people who wished to contribute to its operation, but choose not to actively post..... silent benefactors, one could say. This would raise the total of active users to 340.

C. I have no idea of the number of people who visit Tiki Central, but choose not to post, nor become Grand Members.

D. There are about 75 people who used to post regularly, but no longer post. Some of these are persons who changed user names, some still attend tiki events regularly but no longer post, some of them may have been just too busy during the last 3 months to post, and some seem to have just faded away.

E. With the exception of the initial sign-up rush in 2002, for every 50 people who register, 2-6 stay on to become active members.

C. People are now registering at a faster rate. In 2002/2003, it would often take 3-4 weeks to attract 50 new registered users. Tiki Central now attracts 50 new registered users every 2 weeks.

Finally, I should say that I did this on my own initiative, without any guidance from Hanford. Also, I don't plan on doing this again - this is just a snapshot look at who we are, at this point in time.

Vern

Wow! How long did it take you to compile all those statistics?

Very interesting Vern, I've always been interested in how many TC members actually post on a regular basis.

Thanks for those rough statistics Vern, I was wondering about the amount of true posters also. I'll bet that this is probably similar for other boards, in that huge numbers of people register and less than a quarter of them are active posters. Still....that 6000 is gonna look impressive. :)

FATIMA BLUSH: Oh, how reckless of me. I made you all wet.
JAMES BOND: Yes, but my martini is still dry.

VampTiki

[ Edited by: VampiressRN 2007-03-03 18:08 ]

Here I was reading this, thinking I was all smug being one of the "cool kids", then I checked my profile and it said: (0.51 Messages per day)

Rut roh!

I find the statistics fascinating, the amount of time it took you to figure that out must've been intensive. It does answer a lot of questions (and even raise a few).

Although I read most of the posts at least three times a week, sometimes I'm so brain dead from working I can't think of something pertinent or clever to contribute. My life's become so complicated lately, I come here to escape or be inspired by, like the Volcano thread for example. Here's a thread that was started 2.5 years ago with a simple question that years later was found and a family member was able to unearth a history for both her family and our ohana to enjoy. That's what I love about TC. It's a community that bands together. Each TC member offers a craft, an instruction, advice, a piece of history or sense of humor to this group without hesitation. It doesn't matter how many times a week they post, I think most people contribute in some fashion.

Looking at stats on the users is very interesting, nice work. I have been a member for a while and check pretty much evey day but don't post. Trying to improve on that even if it is just to say nice work.

I'm right at about the same level of you, stuff-o-rama - I post at a rate .50 messages a day ..... oops I just doubled my posting rate with this post!

It really didn't take too long to do this stat work - perhaps 4 hours max. I had some slow afternoons and evenings last week.

One more obscure piece of trivia. Of the above 340 names that I had listed as active members, just over one third of them (118 to be precise) had the characters 'tiki' contained in their user name.

Does anyone else wonder why the word 'tiki' is always tagged as a misspelling when doing a spellcheck?

Vern

340 active members for 6000 registered is about 5% active. Looking at the stats I'm curious as to what goes into the number of views. Is that a unique number? You see a post has 4,000 views and 100 replies. Are the views unique or does the same user checking in twice ( or 3 times ) get counted multiple times? Also, I'm curious as to how many of the views are for registered users versus people just surfing on by. I personally hit Tiki Central several times in Google searches and what not and then lurked for awhile before registering. Just curious.

On 2007-03-04 15:00, stuff-o-rama wrote:
Each TC member offers a craft, an instruction, advice, a piece of history or sense of humor to this group without hesitation. It doesn't matter how many times a week they post, I think most people contribute in some fashion.

You are so right about that, stuff-o-rama! I am so grateful to have found TC! The people here are amazing!!

Thanks Vern for the breakdown and hard work. I would also like to know what percentage of posters use photos in their posts. How would I go about checking this stat?

Impressive bit of reporting Vern. I'm sure, like everyone else, that this endeavor took quite a bit of thought and planning, Far beyond my capabilities for sure and it answers the questions that I'm sure crosses everyones mind eventually. Thanks for taking the time to do this.

My analysis did not take much work. All I had to do was go to the member list, click on each user name, see if the # of messages posted per day was over .14 (approx. one day a week) If it was over .14, I clicked on 'view posts by users' to see if their most recent post happened 3 months ago.

For each username, it thus took me 4 mouse clicks to get this data - and two of those clicks were to backtrack to the original member list. The majority of the users I didn't even have to check, as they had a low number of posts. It really didn't take much time at all to do this - I spend more time and energy composing my various messages than on the work I did.

The saddest part was clicking on a user name, someone whose posts you enjoyed reading, and realizing that they hadn't posted anything in a year or two. This was balanced by the later emergence of some active participant. That is how life goes, some friends disappear, new friends are made, and the cycle goes on and on and on.

Vern

[ Edited by: ikitnrev 2007-03-05 07:33 ]

Seriously, Vern, you are too modest! What you did, while seemingly easy to you, would have been a very tedious task had I attempted it myself. If I had even had the inclination to research this, I probably would've stopped partway through, gotten bored with it, told myself it wasn't worth the effort, that nobody would be interested...and it never would have been completed. Don't sell yourself short. You saw the job through, and posted the results for the rest of us here. In my mind, it's nothing short of amazing! Many are enjoying the fruits of your labor. Well done!

Ditto. Very interesting stats! Im sure I remember reading something from Hanford a few weeks ago stating that he/'they' have the capability to make almost any statistical survey or comparison of stats, etc relatively simply. (he didnt exactly say 'bring your questions on' but Im sure if there were particularly interesting or relevant numbers needed that it wouldnt be such a mammoth task from the Mothership)

Bringing the much larger number of views into play is interesting when you consider that there arent a huge number of active members. ie; thousands of views compared to hundreds of viewers... I think that there is a HEAP of looking for each comment submitted. I would be lucky if I commented on 10% of what I look at (you can only pretend to know-it-all in your particular area of expertise; step outside of that & your cover is blown! :lol: )

The numbers of 'active' people may seem a little disappointing but I think that the ones who do use the place regularly make good use & enjoy it fully. Group-Hug, awwww...

Tama :)

Hey Vern,
Thanks for the interesting and DIY analysis. With the inevitable curiosity that sparked, I hadda go look at my own account to figure out if I'm active or not. I've been more on the "not" side lately.

So I figured out that I can post once every 3 months for the next 7 1/2 years and still be active, but then I'll have to start stepping up the frequency. Right on! That fits in just about perfectly with my long term procrastination plans. If anyone else is odd enough to want the formula I derived, it is:

(msgs per day - .14) * posts / (msgs per day * 46.4)

So for example, GROG has apparently accrued enough that he could last almost 15 years at one post every 3 months and still be active. And RevBoobamBen could go 66 years!

-Randy

On 2007-03-05 17:57, aquarj wrote:
And RevBoobamBen could go 66 years!

-Randy

I am sure he will go far beyond that, being indestructable and all.

Interesting look at the site stats. Something that might explain some of the activity here (or non-activity) from some users like myself is that I usually end up spending the free time I have catching up with all the awesome posts rather than posting myself. And I find that I am woefully behind... lol.

What was 2002? Was that when the site or forum was opened?

I have a sneaky suspicion that one of the reasons for the disparity in members versus active members who, like myself, were simply looking for ideas for a project. They join, poke around read the threads maybe throw out some questions and then move on. I managed to stick around because I find the quality of art produced by the members to be astounding. I've been on the list for over a year but still have less than 100 posts, but then again I have yet to really produce anything myself sort a few tiki bars.

I suppose I could be like some others and post a bunch of comments like "looks great" or "I like your style" but I don't see the need.

Interesting manipulation of stats though, I wonder how it would compare to some other forums I'm on. I've been on one east coast surfing forum for over three years and have made 5 posts. I do look at pretty frequently though.

On 2007-03-05 20:05, Turbogod wrote:

On 2007-03-05 17:57, aquarj wrote:
And RevBoobamBen could go 66 years!

-Randy

I am sure he will go far beyond that, being indestructable and all.

Arrrrrrrr!!!

Wow...I need to post more...only .10 messages per day, d'oh! I never hardly seem to have much to add, since I don't know any of you really and have only met one person from here briefly at Sam's...

Guess I gotta stop beachcombing so much and start posting here more, LOL.

I think Vern's been channeling Monkeyman. :wink:

You Want Recognition Do Ya?

I think Monkeyman and I both experienced very boring days. His happened 3 years ago, mine happened last week.

Back around 1972, I remember when an older brother brought home from technical school an amazing new item. It was an electronic calculator, which featured an electronic LED readout. It did require an adaptor which one plugged into a wall outlet, but it was a handheld, the first one I had ever seen! All the other calculators I had seen up to that point were the desktop models of the type that bankers used, which printed the results onto a spool on paper.

I would borrow this calculator, and go off with a Sears Christmas catalog, and sit and calculate the sum price total of whatever page I was on. I would then flip the page, calculate the totals for those two pages, and then keep on repeating this process. I would do this for perhaps 20-30 pages, before getting bored and going off to do something else. I was at complete peace while doing this - it was a fun, modern, and electronic toy in my mind .... my brother had to remind me to be careful with it, as it probably cost him well over $100.

While doing the above Tiki Central statistics, I felt a bit of nostalgia for the above memory - for that time in my life when all that was required to keep me happy for a short while was a new-fangled electronic calculator.

My next Tiki central project will be to go through every post, and tally the number of times the letter 'e' and the letter 'i' appear. In the English language, the letter 'i' appears 7.0% of the time, while the letter 'o' appears 7.5% of the time. My hypothesis is that those percentages may be flipped, and that the letter 'i' may appear more than 'o' here, simply because of the frequency that the word 'tiki' appears on this forum.

I will do this twice. Once for the group of members who list their 'from city' as an actual state or city location, and once for the group who list a more abstract location (i.e. Treasure Island, or an isolated desert island)

And I will finally repeat the whole entire project once more -- once while completely sober, and again while consuming mai-tais at the rate of one drink per 30 minutes, to see if the numbers come out the same.

This will all require much training though, and I think I will start with fine-tuning the mai-tai consumption rate. One I have reached the proper level of precision there (estimated date: March 10, 2027 ..... or 3 months before that), then I will count starting the 'o's and the 'i's, but only if I can get an 'O' and a 'K' from you all.

'V''e''r''n'

I can relate. I spend all day at work moving data around. Granted it represents hundreds of millions of dollars but it's just data. I achieve a kind of zen like peace when I'm in the microsoft EXCEL world. My data does exactly what I tell it to, unlike my wife and my kids and my dog and my cats and a lot of crap I have no control over. Playing with data is okay.

Like a couple other members have said, they are here, but not always actively posting. I'm a grand member, so I fall into the category of grand Membership but low post percentage. I'm on TC 3-4 timews a week, mostly in the collecting or Marketplace.

That said, I think the numbers are much higher, people just don't post once a week or have taken a TC break, so their post percentage may not meet the requirements.

I guess I don't post things like... "I agree" or "That's cool". I wait until I have somthing to say.

Interesting to know the numbers though.

This will all require much training though, and I think I will start with fine-tuning the mai-tai consumption rate. One I have reached the proper level of precision there (estimated date: March 10, 2027 ..... or 3 months before that), then I will count starting the 'o's and the 'i's, but only if I can get an 'O' and a 'K' from you all.

Whats the 95% confidence interval for that date?

And remember the law of large numbers indicates you should drink at least 30 Mai-tais, if not 50 to make sure your margin of error is small enough to be meaningful. :wink:

zombiepops

I agree...that's cool.

(I figured someone had to....)