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[My Name is Immaterial]

Not for another 11 hours here.
Relevant.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Zrk2]

Anyway, I find it really interesting how the "topics per month" is decreasing fairly rapidly, compared to posts, members, etc. which are all increasing steadily.

I feel like that's because the amount of megathreads is increasing, and those cut down on new topics.

Also new users looks like it's been on a steady decline these past few years. That's probably part of it too - new topics seem to correlate with new members better than any of the other graphs.

Yeah. it's a tendency I don't like. I'd like to see the mega-thread die out because I find they kill off other interesting conversation because people always just say "stick it in the megathread" and then it does out after a page or two and that's that.

[Orange Wizard]

At the same time, though, those topics probably would have died out pretty quickly even if we didn't have the megathread thing. And discussions in the megathreads that people find interesting will spawn their own topics, which continue the conversation a while before - again - dying out because people no longer find it interesting.

[Aklyon]

Can someone yell at me to update this tomorrow? Thanks.

Hey, update the thing.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Right, updated the thing.

[My Name is Immaterial]

April update.


Observation: Daily data from New Members (Monthly too, but to a lesser, vaguer, extent) show a serious decline, now worth making "HMMMM" noises over.
Our lowest ever New Members in one day was October 23rd, 2008, with just one. There have been 2094 days between our last occurrence of only 4 new members in a day, June 28th, 2009 and March 23rd, 2015. The rest of the recent new member counts are back down to 2008/2009 levels. I realize this is mostly due to the lack of major releases, but it's still interesting.

[Orange Wizard]

You're right, new members is plummeting with the force of a thousand suns. Any ideas what's going on there?

[4maskwolf]

You're right, new members is plummeting with the force of a thousand suns. Any ideas what's going on there?

I'm... not entirely sure.  Maybe DF has reached it's publicity limit?  Maybe we're less inclusive than we used to be?  idk

[i2amroy]

My guess is that since Toady implemented the requirement for accounts to be approved we're finally cutting out all of the many spam accounts that are joining the forum.

[My Name is Immaterial]

This is interesting. Toady, if you follow this thread, can you confirm this?

[Flying Dice]

That'd be my guess as well. Remember, the dive started back around late 2013-early 2014ish regarding this:

Starting in roughly 2014 we changed how members were registered because of the love bots -- about 2/3rds (very approximately) of the signups before then starting especially around 2011 were spammers.  Now they only get in every once in a while.  I'm still cleaning that up (I've deleted at least ten thousand accounts over the last couple years, and there's a lot left to go).  So total member counts are basically useless, though members online isn't really affected by spammers (except maybe that weird day).  As far as I can tell, the actual-people membership slowly increases, as does the people online, with the release spikes.  Everything else seems to track with that as well, though I haven't done much with it.

combined with the relative length of time since a major update.

Basically I'd say that we're probably just approaching the point of being able to observe the effective member join rate. There probably won't be trustworthy data on that particular point until the new restrictions have been in place for enough time to generate sufficient points (so ~6-8 months probably), and when it's been that long I'd be willing to be that what it will look like will be fairly stable at lowish levels. Sort of what it looked like before the 2012 spike and at the moment, except with a bit fewer members; the curve on that graph is somewhat misleading, given that the spike is much sharper and either temporal end much flatter than it indicates.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Updated.
Nothing to report this month, it was kinda quiet.

[Skyrunner]

Did someone say automation? I can automation.

[My Name is Immaterial]

That's what I was trying to do with the sandbox tab, but I can't figure out how to remove the unfinished months and the year entries. Also, the data is displayed latest first, which isn't what I wanted, and I can't get the daily data.
If you want to try and automate it, I'll give you editing permission.
In fact, if anyone wants to just poke it, PM me a gmail address, and I'll give you editing permission.