openSUSE Forums Hits 30,000 Users!

[forumsadmin]

openSUSE Forums Hits 30,000 Users!
26-Jun-2009 23:50

Short but sweet post here: Getting a few numbers on community growth for the openSUSE Day introduction at LinuxTag, I noticed that the openSUSE Forums have now passed 30,000 users! That’s pretty amazing considering that we started the merged forums on June 10, 2008. In about one year’s time, we’ve seen more than 30,000 people sign [...]

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there is a difference between "30,000 users" and "more than 30,000
people sign up for the forums" because there is nowhere near 30,000
folks here on any one day (or week)..

that is, a person who "signed up", came once (maybe to deposit spam or
look around) and left certainly can't be counted as a "user" _today_..

anyway, if it were true that there are 30,000 users here today, that
certainly is nothing to crow about:

who was it, Ashton Kutcher got over a million "signed up" (to follow
his twitter tweets) in a couple of months....so, do we really wanna
trumpet the minuscule nature of our dismally small gathering??

--
.~.
/V\
/( )\
natural^^-^^pilot

[caf4926]

who was it, Ashton Kutcher got over a million "signed up"

It's a Fickle world. The smallest of things entertain the smallest of minds. I wonder what kind of person is interested in the ablutions of Mr Kutcher.

If you had quoted Stephen Fry it might have had some relevance, but as it is you choose some random bloke who as far as I am aware has no interest in or connection to 'Linux' and even less to 'openSUSE'.
Stephen Fry — Happy birthday to GNU — The GNU Operating System

We have every right and good reason to celebrate our small but growing community. openSUSE is certainly one of the leading Linux distributions and as the 'Brainless Posting Bot' points out: This follows a major restructuring of the forums.

You are quite correct though and I wonder what the figure includes exactly. If it is total registrations, then does that include persons who register to spam us and are then banned? It seems likely.

Nevertheless: 'All Hail openSUSE'
There - I celebrate this momentous occasion!

[ken_yap]

I bet the ranked posters vs posts bar chart can be approximated by a Poisson distribution.

caf4926 wrote:
>> who was it, Ashton Kutcher got over a million "signed up"
> I wonder what kind of person is interested in the ablutions of Mr Kutcher.
>
> If you had quoted Stephen Fry it might have had some relevance

my point _exactly_ a person of no standing/importance (in my mind)
gathers ~33 times the number of 'users' in one-sixth the time!

--
.~.
/V\
/( )\
natural^^-^^pilot

[deano_ferrari]

I bet the ranked posters vs posts bar chart can be approximated by a Poisson distribution.

I would imagine this kind of distribution would be typical of all forums. It would be interesting to know the active membership numbers as a function of time (members who post at least once a month say).

[caf4926]

Traffic is way higher than the membership would ever suggest:

Eg: At the time of this post

1,020 Users Online (19 members and 1,001 guests)

[lcup]

Originally Posted by caf4926

Traffic is way higher than the membership would ever suggest:

Well hello. I'm one of those very new members.
Indeed this forum looks very lively. Much more lively than I was told to think. I am not afraid having to wait several days for an answer.

> 1,020 Users Online (19 members and 1,001 guests)

hmmmmmm...there is something bad wrong with that "1,001 guests"..

well, i guess a bunch of them could be search engine crawlers,
spam-house eAddress harvesters, a few actual guests coming in to read
hits served up by google et al, and another few actual 'users'
trekking in via nntp (and therefore counted as 'guest'), like myself..

so, i reckon that the "users online" traffic count you quote suffers
from a skew similar to the "Forum Hits 30,000 Users!" (rather than
30,000 have signed up) metric which kicked off this thread..

and, i wonder where that "users online" count is taken? is it only in
forums.opensuse.org or is it instead everywhere within opensuse.org

there is a difference between "forum users" and a snapshot of web
domain hits..

--
.~.
/V\
/( )\
natural^^-^^pilot

[caf4926]

@natural_pilot
Maybe Kim from our admin will see this and offer clarification. I just check a message he posted in our mod area and it does specify 'Registrations'.

How accurate the figures I gave are, I'm not sure. But they are available to me in the moderator area. But you really need the clarity that an admin can offer.