Here are some observations based solely upon anecdotal experience as I have no access to any activity statistics that may be available to the PTB at TER:

1.  The typical post (one with some kind of interesting content) gets about 200 reads within 24 hours.  

2.  This same post will only see about 500 reads by the end of the week.  The typical post doesn’t seem to see its number of reads increase by much after that; however, the more popular threads are getting over 1,000 reads by the end of the month.

3.  By the end of a year the typical post will be seeing nearly 1,000 reads and the more popular ones nearly double that amount.  I don’t really know much about how this works but I assume this activity is predominantly bots searching our board for keywords.

4.  It would seem that an “active” participant posts an average of 1-2 posts per week.

5.  We are currently experiencing a posting activity level of approximately 30 posts per day.


So what does this mean?  Since not everyone posts every week or reads every post when they visit and some post more often than once a week, I would guess that we have about 200 active participants, i.e. someone who posts a message at least once a week.  I might also conclude that we have an additional 500 or so active “lurkers” or someone who drops by to read the board at least once a week but rarely posts with maybe another 500 or so occasional lurkers who drop by at least once a month to catch up on activities or to search the board.  This might make the running total well in excess of about 1,000 regular forum participants on a monthly basis.  

Then again my numbers could be low.  Anyone have any additional thoughts/conclusions?

Take care,


TS Tempted


P.S.  BTW we are currently at 2,148 posts this quarter, less than 40 shy of our old all-time record from last quarter.