Looking at this post and the counters on the home/front page of the forums, we see that the number of forums members has increased by 50% in less than a year …
Cheers to all reading this !!!
Welcome to all the new members! Cheers to the community! 
Without wanting to be negative, one has to look at aktive members and not at the historical all time pass by. I have the feeling that out of these 45000 there will be a big part of people that where just registered once and never came back. Guess even Spam accounts will be counted. So I would be rather prudential and see in the 45000 a indication that the current regulation (for what I know) does not technically allow for user to cancel their account - provided they wish so, and that the forum admins do not “clean up” that list after let’s say a period of 1 year of total and continuous inactivity (I would suppose again for practical reasons). About 6500 are still called active I recall…(what means then active?).
But yap, cheers to everybody who is still, again, or newly here.
I also note
Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 15:06
…
This is the number recording the number of users logged on at all at once and has nothing to do with users who visted x years ago and never visited again … its the # logged on simultaneous, ie all at once.
Prior to the merge, I do not think ANY of our individual forums ever approched anything close to that number, including spam or what ever.
In fact, I think our measures in place to stop spam are superior to what was in at least one of the pre-merge forums, hence from my perspective, with my having been an active pariticipant BEFORE the three forum merge, and now, that there is a MASSIVE increase in the membership.
My view is well done to all for the efforts.
Go, openSUSE Forums, go, go, go!!!
we see that the number of forums members has increased by 50% in less than a year …
The numbers actually increased by 45.000 since June 9th, 2008. Great work!
I agree on the Spam protection. Very efficient, I noticed.
BTW: which forums where merged (I would guess you are speaking about English speaking forums?) Or is in this count also comprised the German speaking one (with an external link). I would guess not. And there is a big Italian forum that is however not represented with a link here… Is there a reason?
BTW. as I am a bit curious about statistics, is there any way to get the data of online presence of the site, for a little private research. Nothing professional but a personal curiosity (especially a curiosity about chronological coincidences). You know, that thing that kills the cat… 
oldcpu wrote:
> I also note > Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 15:06 …
that is a shockingly high number…
so high so as to be unbelievable…
obviously, that date is sometime after the log in/out mechanism
stopped automatically logging folks out after 2 hours (or whatever it
used to be)…
i wonder how many of those 30k were actually active or just still
logged in, with no activity for hours/days…
let me ask: if log in and then shut down my machine without clicking a
log out button, would i be counted as online?
and, what is the auto-logout timing trigger now?
–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
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Yep. There’s always a reason found to dispute figures. And figures will always be disputed actually. I know that. Yet I’m glad the community is growing.
What happens here is no different from what happens in any community. For example a small village’s church community: it will have active members, it will have members that only show up at christmas, a wedding etc.
Objection your Honor. We do not dispute. We try to understand the figures. At least this is my case. And I think that to continue to do so is not a sign of negativity, but of genuine interest. Possibly I would like to have my post understood like that.
After all, statistics, if well done, can be very helpful for a site. For me it would e.g. be very interesting to understand the real importance of the forum in terms of PR. Are the users increasing more in the period shortly before/or in the same moment as a new release comes out or do they increase only after because people come only for problems. If the first thing would be true, more PR work could-should be done through the site, if not, then the current setup is perfectly fitting because it gives a good accent on technical support.
Somehow I cannot help it, but I feel that some PR potential is lost.
Oldcpu had setup for example HOWTOs integrated in the site. I think this is a very good idea (as long as one is coping with version and redundancy/duplication). BTW. a lot of users that come for the first time to Linux do not even know what FAQ, WIKI and other documentation mean, they are lost and probably would enjoy sticky explanations in the form of a glossary to understand the use of these instruments.
All this is OT but to point out that people who ask about numbers and question do not “dispute”.
FYI
261 users are in the group “spammers”.
A further 31 spammers in different categories have been banned
In the last 24 hours 304 registered users visited
I must say that I think the 30559 number is an error, we had some kind of glitch once and that number popped out IIRC. Must look into that – will search the Mod’s archives.
Admit: I was a bit premature. Just wanted to prevent one of those endless discussions where every new post proves the wrong of the previous. I’m aware of the fact that not the figures are disputable, but the methods to get them.
Thank you swerda, very interesting. Actually I am positively surprised about the low number of Spammers, I would have expected worse. Interesting.
I believe it. Why is it so shocking? We ARE a large community. Its just most users say nothing and lurk. I lukered for 7 years before I started posting.
In the old SLS forum we on occasions had numbers > 10,000 users visiting …
The old SF forum had similar numbers. I was an active participant in both of those old forums …
I do not know about the Novell forum (which was the third involved in the merge) but I do believe they also brought a number of users to our new forum.
I think there is a definite synergy that has been obtained by the 3 forum merge, and numbers such as that quoted suggest to me that in terms of number of visits to our forum, were were successful in the merge.
Now do I think exactly 30559 separate people were visitiing on at that time? No, I think some had left their pc on the forum, and went to a movie, or they were doing something else with the pc having a forum page open. I think others were visiting via separate multiple pcs at the same time (I do that fairly often). I think some users went to a different web site, and then came back. I think there were a certain number of visits by search engines … etc …
… but I also do not think that number is shocking nor unrealistic. Rather it is consistent with pre-merge numbers, and I would be disappointed if we did not see such numbers.
Why is it so hard to believe? Did you ever check the numbers of the 3 forums pre-merge? Do have have a handle at all on the pre-merge numbers?
Possibly, but I think the number is still reasonable given the past pre-forum merge numbers.
Days?? … my guess is a BIG ZERO.
swerdna, I’m not convinced its an error. We had numbers > 10,000 for each of our SLS and SF forums pre-merge. [or am I out by a factor of 10 ?? … I need to go check some old posts were we discussed this and specific post counts of old forums brought up]
I note right now:
112 members and 7028 guests
Most users ever online was 30559, 08-Jan-2010 at 15:06.
7028 guests.
So what is the criteria to trigger a count of the 7028 guests ?
In my view the 7028 guests (which is not a peak) is consistent with the 30559. Typically in the past the numbers peak for a wide period of a few months after the time of a new openSUSE release.
stakanov wrote:
> Actually I am positively surprised
> about the low number of Spammers, I would have expected worse.
> Interesting.
yep, it is a good thing almost all of those spammers ‘grew up’ in the
M$ GUI Only & HTTP Age, otherwise they would know about the drawbridge
over the moat on the back side of the castle with neither need to have
an ID/Pass nor proactive watchman on the gate… 
[just stretching the cognitive powers of the multi-lingual in this
place…]
–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
posted via NNTP w/TBird 2.0.0.23 | KDE 3.5.7 | openSUSE 10.3
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AMD Athlon 1 GB RAM | GeForce FX 5500 | ASRock K8Upgrade-760GX |
CMedia 9761 AC’97 Audio
I don’t find K35 wild, just very surprising, but I’m happyto admit that I’m often wrong (a fact that my wife and kdz endorse).
I for one don’t find these numbers impossible to believe. Granted I’m rather new to the community I have observed a couple of things that help explain the growth. For instance in other communities ( not all necessarily Linux based but computer/nerd oriented) there is often a lot of jabbing of the new or less knowledgeable especially if they ask what more experienced memebers would consider a stupid question. Well here I’ve noted that everyone seems friendly to everyone aside from the occasional trouble maker. I for one will be much more likely to come back to a forum to ask more questions or read up on what’s new if the members are nice and I feel comfortable posting.
The other thing I’ve noticed is response time this community is amazingly fast when it comes to someone atleast responding to a new thread… Not necessarily with the answer right away but someone is always willing to help/troubleshoot.
In summary I suppose I’m trying to say… Good job
Often I visit withou logging on. So inthese cases a ‘guest’.
I think many visit to seek help (the strong point) and others lurk to learn. I think it sonly after acertain competancy is reached than users ‘use’ the forums. The very new do not, as they find many explainations ‘technical’. One answer by SWERDNA to an othe person solved a problem I had and thus ‘drew me in to the forum’. Thisis probably typical ( & thanks swerdna!)