During my cleanup of the database today I extracted some location information about us all based on our locations. The following table shows the number of members from each location.

New South Wales - 330.
Victoria - 249.
Queensland - 169.
South Australia - 80.
Western Australia - 68.
Tasmania - 24.
Northern Territory - 6.
Australian Capital Territory - 18.
New Zealand - 20.
United Kingdom - 21
United States of America - 42.
Canada - 8.
Other - 135.

The numbers shown for each Australian state and territory seem pretty much aligned to the population of each jurisdiction. The total for 'other' will include some Australian members who did not state a location before the rules on locations changed though there are also members from Ireland, Austria, Poland, Singapore, Germany, Holland, France, Brazil, Greece, Denmark, South Africa, Hong Kong, Serbia, Namibia, Belarus and Switzerland present.

It would be interesting to see last login dates against each of those members.

There are login dates but these are anonymous as they are recorded in the events log. I reckon it can be taken for granted that lots of members who were once active are no longer, for whatever reason.

Then there's those who come to ask one or two questions and then that's it. There's probably about 20 automated registrations too - signups by computers programmed by spammers rather than real people.

I guess Pareto's ratio wouldn't be far off the mark for those who still log in, and probably again in terms of the ratio of so-called "lurkers" to active posters.

As for the "oncers", I'm frustrated by those who ask a question for which we request more follow-up info from them in order to provide a useful answer but they never respond. I think some of that may be put down to not being able to find their original post -- hopefully the highlighting of new.updated posts and reverse chronological sorting arrangement will help prevent that in future.

BTW: In line with the previous point, I would strongly recommend that reverse chronological sorting be the default action rather than members having to turn it on via their profiles. IMO, new/occasional members will not be aware of that need and will thus miss out on the benefit of it.

I guess if you really wanted to know Brad, you could start one thread and everyone who regularly signs in could reply once. This would gauge current activity.
Peter

As for the "oncers", I'm frustrated by those who ask a question for which we request more follow-up info from them in order to provide a useful answer but they never respond.

A lot of people find online communication a bit intimidating. I know I did when I first started using IRC chatrooms way back in 1998. At the time I thought the users were going to jump out of the screen and attack me. Well, it wasn't really that bad but it was easy enough to imagine.

From my occasional inspections of the site logs, some people sign up with passwords they have no hope of remembering and despite the simplicity of the password retrieval feature they can't seem to get their head around it or they forget which e-mail address they used to sign up with and therefore cannot use it. Frustrated by little things like this a lot of people just put it down to a bad experience.

In line with the previous point, I would strongly recommend that reverse chronological sorting be the default action rather than members having to turn it on via their profiles. IMO, new/occasional members will not be aware of that need and will thus miss out on the benefit of it.

It might be worth a try, especially for new members. However, even though it may seem to make sense to enable it across the board, I am reluctant to force it on existing members. To enable it for new members it will take just one extra line of code in the registration application script so I will do that this week.

I guess if you really wanted to know Brad, you could start one thread and everyone who regularly signs in could reply once. This would gauge current activity.

Site logging shows members logging in and the type of login they use (temporary or 368 day cookie). I reckon about 30 members are true regulars with another 30 or so popping in six or seven times a year just to make sure we are still here.

"It might be worth a try, especially for new members ... so I will do that this week.

Thanks. I do think it will be useful for them.

The forgotten password problem will always be with us. I worked for a company where the help desk was regularly inundated every Monday morning by calls from staff who had forgotten their password.

Being able to subscribe to a thread and be emailed when it receives replies is a nice feature of many sites, and I use it myself occasionally when a site is not heavily trafficked.

Given the bespoke nature of this site's construction, I think that would probably be too much to ask.

I've often thought about introducing e-mail subscriptions. It can be done but won't be the easiest function to impliment and I would have to be very careful with testing too. You guys won't appreciate getting dozens of practice e-mails whilst I debug things.

It is a good idea though and probably something that should be built.