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Steve B
10-05-2008, 05:35 AM
I just noticed we cracked the 100 mark for total members!

It stands at 101 as I write this, so I don't know who the lucky new member was. Was there a balloon drop or anything that I missed???

orion_joel
10-05-2008, 07:37 AM
I don't think you missed it. I had even forget to look at member count for a long while. using the clean link's over Vbulletin's standard links does not let you see what member number you are, however i would expect it is in the back end. it would be somewhere.

Anyway it is a good milestone. I think the far greater number of forums often die off before this point, and it is a credit to the Steve, Steve and Kristine. To have built a community with the other members here that has maintained it's momentum.

KristineS
10-05-2008, 09:32 AM
A 100+ members is pretty cool. Thanks to all of you who are helping to make this community grow and to keep it going. Your a great group with a lot of useful knowledge and we appreciate you sharing it here.

cbscreative
10-05-2008, 07:15 PM
I second that, Kristine. We may be the admins, but the members here are what really makes the difference. I didn't even notice the milestone, but I did notice the other day that we were up around 86 or so.

mr.ro
10-06-2008, 06:11 PM
That's pretty cool to reach that number i know we will keep growing as a great forum with the people here. Great job to the ones that made this forum.

Watchdog
11-10-2008, 08:25 PM
Yes, let' hope for more. Forums are hard to "fire up" these days. I have one I started years ago and it's now pretty profitable - a niche site for the sheet metal industry with about 5400 members.

I tried to set up other forums and it was a total failure. I just didn't have the time to watch them and feed them content...

Forums grow if there is contributing forum members as this one seems to have. I'll be honest, I spend too much time on forums :) But this is right up my ally.

orion_joel
11-12-2008, 01:04 AM
I am the same as your Watchdog, i seem to spend to much time on forums, however i do so because it feels like it is accomplishing something for me even if it is just a little discussion on topics that interest me.

We are now sitting over 200 members here, however seems it shows only 87 active members (i wonder what the level of activity needed is to be classed active), I think it maybe is people register then forget to come back or just find it hard to find the time.

Steve B
11-12-2008, 05:46 AM
It depends on where you look. I see 215 at the bottom of the main page, but I see 135 on the Members List section (that's where I originally noticed when we went over 100). I'm sure VG will clarify the differences between all these numbers - including the definition of "active".

vangogh
11-12-2008, 01:01 PM
The difference in numbers is mostly due to members who have been banned I think. We get hit with spammers as all forums do. Once they're banned they no longer show up on the member's list, but they still count in the total members shown on the home page. If you look at the .com forum you can see they show 28,000+ members on the home page, but only 20,000+ on the member's list. The difference should mostly be members who have been banned. There may be other groups that don't show up on the member's list too, but I think the majority are banned members.

A couple of months ago out of curiosity I looked at some large forums and compared the counts on the home page and the member list and 20% banned members seemed to be common. I guess at the moment we're showing more than 20% banned members, but that's mostly because we're still relatively new. I would think over time we'll end up with similar numbers to other forums.

Active members are members who have signed in over a specific time frame. I think it's set as a month here. So the count is the number of members who have signed in over the last month (it might technically be 30 days). I think the time frame can be changed in the settings, but 30 days seemed reasonable to me.

As long as you sign in once every 30 days you'll be counted as an active member. My own feeling is that's one of the better numbers to look at when considering forum members. I've noticed a lot of forums don't show the active count. The .com forum used to, but stopped shortly after we opened the doors here. While they show a lot of members they weren't showing many active members. I think we were actually showing more active members here, though that may have changed as they've begin to build up new members again.

Just for some numbers from another forum I found that digitalpoint shows both numbers on the home page.

Members: 223,339, Active Members: 60,999

That's a lot of members no matter which number you look at, but consider that a little more than 25% of their total members have logged in over the time frame they have set. Forums gain members over the years, but many participate for awhile and move on to other things.

To me the active member count is really the best measure of the size of the community at any forum.

Steve B
11-12-2008, 09:00 PM
That's an even better answer than I expected!

orion_joel
11-12-2008, 10:32 PM
Steve B, i think we should not under estimate the answers we may receive from Vangogh, when questioned on things like this.

vangogh
11-12-2008, 11:00 PM
I figured I'd give you the details Steve.