# inflated membership numbers??



## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

just wondering how much the membership numbers are inflated ??
i know i have three different user names, although i mainly use just one ...
and i wonder how many users haven't been on in a while ..
there is no way for the user to tell with this new software


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## Stumpy (Mar 19, 2013)

Curiosity? Doing research? 

I'm not trying to be snarky. Just wondering why it matters.


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## Big Ed (Jun 16, 2009)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> just wondering how much the membership numbers are inflated ??
> i know i have three different user names, although i mainly use just one ...
> and i wonder how many users haven't been on in a while ..
> there is no way for the user to tell with this new software


Why do you have 3 user names?
That means you have 3 accounts?
Why?


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

The membership numbers will only be as accurate as the membership allows.....having 3 accounts for one person will skew those numbers......should call the number “accounts” instead of members then......


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## gregc (Apr 25, 2015)

might be better to consider "active" accounts, accounts that have at least added a comment to a thread lately (pick a time) or viewed a thread if that requires logging in (?)


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

yes, i have three accounts, only one can be considered active ...
reason, just personal curiosity ...
active, yes that would be ideal, say in the last thirty days, but as a user there seems to be no way to actually get those numbers ?? unless you know of a way to do this ???


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## 65446 (Sep 22, 2018)

And when you find your answer, then what ? And *you* are one of the *inflate*-ors ! 🤓


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## T-Man (May 16, 2008)

On the Forums page go to top contributors and click VIew All. Then to the left you can search for any member. With any member you can click their icon and on their page view the line last visit.


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## bigdodgetrain (Jun 12, 2015)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> yes, i have three accounts, only one can be considered active ...
> reason, just personal curiosity ...
> active, yes that would be ideal, say in the last thirty days, but as a user there seems to be no way to actually get those numbers ?? unless you know of a way to do this ???


you have found a flaw in the forum.

imo no one should have more then one log in.

how do we know who to answer with more then one log in.


me thinks anyone with more then one handle is up to no good.


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

T-Man said:


> On the Forums page go to top contributors and click VIew All. Then to the left you can search for any member. With any member you can click their icon and on their page view the line last visit.


yes, that will get me ONE member at a time, not an effective way to get 22,000 results in an effective time frame ...any other suggestions ???


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Again....why is it so important to you....?


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

Old_Hobo said:


> Again....why is it so important to you....?


again, personal curiosity, 
i really want to know how may 'active users' there are ...
maybe a couple of hundred ??


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

And when (and if) you find your answer.....then what.....?


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

Old_Hobo said:


> And when (and if) you find your answer.....then what.....?


probably nothing, it's just personal curiosity, remember ??


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## T-Man (May 16, 2008)

Are you looking for what we had before with Daily Visitors?


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> probably nothing, it's just personal curiosity, remember ??


I guess we can all have a personal curiosity. And my personal curiosity is why you so badly need to know......?


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## Severn (May 13, 2016)

If I were doing it, I'd just calculate all accounts ever created. If someone really wanted to know I might calculate accounts posting in the last year as "active". I bet that's a few percent of the total accounts created. As for multiple accounts, well I'd guess for this kind of forum only a few do that... So it doesn't dramatically change it.


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## vette-kid (May 2, 2020)

Why would someone bother to make multiple accounts???

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk


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## 65446 (Sep 22, 2018)

Old_Hobo said:


> And when (and if) you find your answer.....then what.....?


Hey Snark Bark ! That's what I said !!


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

Severn said:


> If I were doing it, I'd just calculate all accounts ever created. If someone really wanted to know I might calculate accounts posting in the last year as "active". I bet that's a few percent of the total accounts created. As for multiple accounts, well I'd guess for this kind of forum only a few do that... So it doesn't dramatically change it.


basically yes, just the recent active accounts, and yes, i can do that individually by each member ...
just wondering if there was a way to display members sorted by last login, that's all ..
and yes, i do -assume- that it's a small percentage


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## aquakiwi (Oct 2, 2019)

You, your alto ego and??????


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

aquakiwi said:


> You, your alto ego and??????


and a nutter one, lol


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## Severn (May 13, 2016)

I mean the developers could do it but I don't know that they have the interest or even how to contact them.

As for multiple accounts ... I've seen that before, also changing the user name often. But over on places generate a lot of pushing and shoving among members etc...


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Considering that you've already admitted to inflating the user counts, I can't say I'm impressed. As for finding active user accounts, I'm afraid you'll have to do it the hard way unless you know the secret admin handshake.


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## Severn (May 13, 2016)

but what does 'active' mean? made a post in the last X time units (day, weeks, months, years)? Or maybe just logged in ...


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

I understood that multiple accounts on a forum were called "sock puppets" and were sometimes set up by people so they could post replioes to their postings and make a whole thread of comments and discussion themselves.


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## Severn (May 13, 2016)

yeah i didn't want to get into it. i've only as i said tended to see this on sites where controversy is the name of the game. also some folks like to like their own posts. i mean you know... whatever.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Lee Willis said:


> I understood that multiple accounts on a forum were called "sock puppets" and were sometimes set up by people so they could post replioes to their postings and make a whole thread of comments and discussion themselves.


When I want to talk to myself, I do it in private.


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## CTValleyRR (Jul 26, 2014)

gregc said:


> might be better to consider "active" accounts, accounts that have at least added a comment to a thread lately (pick a time) or viewed a thread if that requires logging in (?)


Of course, some of the most active accounts rarely if ever post about model railroading...


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

when i said only one was active, that's simply what i meant ...
i do not use the other accounts, just the one active one ..
but yes, this does throw the membership numbers off, just as members who registered ten years ago, and never returned ..
guest accounts, while not registering as members, contribute nothing to the forum, as well as do my other two accounts do not return private messages [if they exist] as they are not active, and do no contribute as well ..
i do -suspect- however, that active members [a logon with thirty days], are few , possibly less than a thousand, i will probably not find out, as i have no desire to manually go through all the accounts one by one ..
as i stated before, it was just a personal question ..


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

just so that it's clear, the first account had maybe a dozen posts, and i forgot the password....t was easier to set up a new account ..
the second was in place about seven years, and had 3444 posts, i killed that one several months ago, and have not used it since ..
i just use the newest one ..


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## AFGP9 (Apr 8, 2015)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> basically yes, just the recent active accounts, and yes, i can do that individually by each member ...
> just wondering if there was a way to display members sorted by last login, that's all ..
> and yes, i do -assume- that it's a small percentage


Sounds like you are going to an awful lot of work for no reason other than you just got to know for reasons I can't figure. Maybe you are trying to find somebody especially since you have 3 log in accounts??


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## Severn (May 13, 2016)

It's ok by me. No biggie for whatever that's worth.


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

AFGP9 said:


> Sounds like you are going to an awful lot of work for no reason other than you just got to know for reasons I can't figure. Maybe you are trying to find somebody especially since you have 3 log in accounts??


no, not trying to find someone, just working at getting a reasonably accurate number for active users, that's all.
on another topic, how would three login accounts help me find someone, especially when they are used in ONE sequence ??. that option has never even crossed my mind, lol


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## 65446 (Sep 22, 2018)

aquakiwi said:


> You, your alto ego and??????


It's *alter* ego, not alto ego ....Or, were you referring to opera singers and saxophonists ?


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## sjm9911 (Dec 20, 2012)

I haven't been on in months, i still stop by every now and again to read stuff, but don't log in. So am i active or not? If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it does it make a sound...........


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

if you don't log on, [whether you contribute or not], the system doesn't know who you are.... and would not be considered 'active' [to me anyways], if you haven't logged on in the last month ..


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## sjm9911 (Dec 20, 2012)

Well i posted , so i guess im now active


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

yep, you are active, lol


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## bigdodgetrain (Jun 12, 2015)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> just so that it's clear, the first account had maybe a dozen posts, and i forgot the password....t was easier to set up a new account ..
> the second was in place about seven years, and had 3444 posts, i killed that one several months ago, and have not used it since ..
> i just use the newest one ..



why didn't you request your password be reset.

and i would never give up 3444 posts if had that many.


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## vette-kid (May 2, 2020)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> just so that it's clear, the first account had maybe a dozen posts, and i forgot the password....t was easier to set up a new account ..
> the second was in place about seven years, and had 3444 posts, i killed that one several months ago, and have not used it since ..
> i just use the newest one ..


That's not really clearing anything up. Not that it really matters, but you can't convince me that creating a new account is easier than requesting a password reset. Then you just "killed" an existing, operating account? Why in the world would you do that? Makes no sense. You just wake up one day and decide "hmmm, I think I'll create new log in for all my forum accounts today"!?

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## Dennis461 (Jan 5, 2018)

I had one account from home and one from work.


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Why? One account will work from anywhere......


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

vette-kid said:


> Then you just "killed" an existing, operating account? Why in the world would you do that? Makes no sense.


maybe not to you, but it did to me, i don't miss the 3444 posts at all... different mindset then ./.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Getting back to the original question and comment, the forum's software has a way of counting members and postings and activity that might not correspond to how a particularly person might think they should be counted, but as long as they stick with a counting system consistently month by month the method serves the forum owners' and operators' needs in tracking activity and managing server capacity and it will work for them. 

The totals posted for # of members and daily postings and views always seem high (here and elsewhere) to me on all the forums I visit, and all 'members on now' counts in every forum I have ever been on (not just model train forums) seem to be wildly over-counting. About five or six years ago I tutored a high-school STEM advanced math class in data analytics. One assigment I gave them was to analyze traffic on several on-line forums, including a big model train forum (but not this one, this was before I was a member here) beginning with gathering data themselves, not trusting the counts given on the forum, and determine what they could about the actual versus reported activity. The kids concluded that counts were "high" because the forum software counted eveyone who had ever registered as a member, even if they had not been active in years, and counted every click or scroll (as when you scroll down to read the next posting) as a view and counted every log-in in a day as "on now." So you could say the forum owners were "overcounting." But the counting method was accurate in the sense that on days and weeks when activity was high the counts went up, and when it was low they went down, always proportional to activity the kids counted by actually monitoring the sites every day.

That assignment was interesting not just for that conclusion, but for what their subsequent study using pattern recognizers and data mining found. This was the first time I have ever heard about "sock puppets" - people with multiple accounts who use them to respond to or praise their own postings, or simploy have some agreeing with them in an on-line discussion. Using a variety of pattern recognition methods they identified sets of member names that had a "very high liklihood" of being the same person, and when I looked it was obvious in some cases. The train forum had a few members who had at least three accounts that they would routinely use to post what appeared to be positive or supportive replies to their own postings and oninions. They found such suspicious sets of accounts on every forum they analyzed - model train, cars, gardening, and others, but what I found most interesting is that far and away, the forum that had they most prevalent and persistent use of sock pupperts was a large poetry forum.

Advertisers are not getting duped by these numbers, by the way. An owner/operator selling advertising has an incentive to overstate or use a counting algorithm that is optimistic, but saavy advertisers will ask for a description of how the counts are made and consider that inany decision. They also study over time if the advertising is effective, and that is the thing that brings them back as continuous customers. About six to seven years ago I was an advertiser on the OGR forum and in OGR magazine and was given such information (when I asked) about membership and views on the forum and about readership of the magazine. By selectively buying one or the other for a while, and advertising other places (TCA magazine) I determined how effective the advertising in the forum and the magazines was and how and where to buy the most bang for my bucks. The actual counts really did not enter into my decisions on advertising, only how effective it was in ways I could see and count.


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## CTValleyRR (Jul 26, 2014)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> yep, you are active, lol


As I posted above, do you plan to distinguish users who post about model trains, or does ANY activity count?


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

CTValleyRR said:


> As I posted above, do you plan to distinguish users who post about model trains, or does ANY activity count?


not sure what i can get, if any...
but [in my opinion], ANY activity where the member is logged in [so that the system can recognize them], would count as an activity ...


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

thanks for your insight, Lee .. it's most appreciated, especially the part about results mattering more than anything else ...
in the result of 'The kids concluded that counts were "high" because the forum software counted eveyone who had ever registered as a member, even if they had not been active in years, ', i am confident that is what is happening here, and while i have no results to go by, all i wanted was to determine [for myself] what the number of active users was, even just logged in within thirty days, that's all ..


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> . . . all i wanted was to determine [for myself] what the number of active users was, even just logged in within thirty days, that's all ..


"Active" is supject to interpretation, but in any case regardless of how you define it, with any realistic definition it would not be really that high. If you define it as a person who opens and reads forum postings, here, on the O-Guage scale forum - the one with the most traffic I think, it may be less than 100 on any given day. If you define it as people who participate by posting, it could be less than or only a dozen people posting in a day, and probably less than one hundred in a week. On OGR, which is more populous, it can still be far fewer than 100 per day or 500 people per month who are participating. You can actually count the number of threads started and posts made in a day although it is laborious, and it is an eye-opener: a forum can seem very busy and yet only a few dozen are really active.

It isn't just model train forums that are "small" - years ago I was a moderator/adminstrator or a big Corvette forum (it claimed to be the biggest and I think it was) and while there were several thousand registered members, many had not posted in years. I considered it a very active forum: even more so than OGR;s hi-rail forum. If I remember correctly, fewer than 800 posted in any one year, only about 100 were active enough that they posted at least once in every month of the past year, and fewer than two dozen posted at least once in all 52 weeks of the year.


On thing worth thinking about is that, near as the kids in my STEM class could see and also what the published figures from some forums show, there are at least three or four times as many people looking at the forum postings for every one that posts something. Most "users" (whether registered members or just visotors) simply log on to look and read, and never, or very seldom, post anything themselves. I was disappointed when I first determined this - I'd like to hear from more people - but it is what it is. Apparentlymany people jst like to listen, not talk . . .


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## highvoltage (Apr 6, 2014)

Aard D'Vaark said:


> thanks for your insight, Lee .. it's most appreciated, especially the part about results mattering more than anything else ...
> in the result of 'The kids concluded that counts were "high" because the forum software counted everyone who had ever registered as a member, even if they had not been active in years, ', i am confident that is what is happening here, and while i have no results to go by, all i wanted was to determine [for myself] what the number of active users was, even just logged in within thirty days, that's all ..


I think what you are looking for are the membership statistics that were shown in the previous software (vBulletin) that was used on this forum. The current software (XenForo) does not present membership roles the way that vBulletin did.


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## T-Man (May 16, 2008)

The stats page does have on line members section( top on the left) and what they are viewing.


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## Mark VerMurlen (Aug 15, 2015)

Lee, thanks for the insights.

I think forum behavior is based on if people come here for social reasons or to learn and get/give help. I’ll read a number of posts, but if I can’t help or offer meaningful advice that furthers the conversation, then I don’t post. So sometimes there are several days between my posts even though I read the forum multiple times each day. I am an introvert, which carries over into my posting behavior. I’m sure there are many people like me and also others that are extroverts that enjoy more conversational threads. It’s also true that “life happens” and we get pulled away by other things for weeks, months, or years before coming back. There is also an ebb and flow based on the season of the year where model train activity is higher and lower. So a big picture view over years is probably more useful than single snapshots of counts.

Almost all the products I’ve bought for my railroad were because of recommendation or positive results I’ve seen here on this forum. So I think one of the best forms of advertisement that a manufacturer can do is build great products and support their customers such that they get great results. That’s the modern day “word of mouth” advertising.


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## Aard D'Vaark (Aug 1, 2019)

appreciate the response ...
i have come to realize that the information i want is not easily obtainable, lol


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## sjm9911 (Dec 20, 2012)

CTValleyRR said:


> As I posted above, do you plan to distinguish users who post about model trains, or does ANY activity count?


Happy now , i posted on some train stuff  lol.


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