You have way too much time on your hands.
It's the joy of being retired. I did wonder about the "lifecycle" of the average forum user. This lead me to "internet culture" and the lack of clear metrics with respect to forums. I also know that a page counts would increment on
every call to the page, if you had 10 graphics and 1 text, that's 11 page counts, but they worked that out since I first found out about that tidbit.
Don't you wonder about the acquisition and retention of the membership? What separates a good forum from a bad forum and a very good forum from the good forum?
A homework help section could have a dozen answers for an inquiry ... that could lead to a couple of possibilities:
- the forum is dragging out the info from the OP little by little to ensure the OP learns
- the forum members gang up and hit the OP with a dozen different scenarios
- or others I can't immediately recall.
I'm sure the political forums are filled with true believers ... on every side of the spectrum ... and their participation level would be higher than most narrowly focused forums.
I did find it interesting that a majority of the new users on month drop considerably the next month. Looking at the overall growth coupled with that breakdown by membership, illustrates the drop off even after accounting for the differences in membership from month over month.
Yes, I have too much time on my hands ... till January.