Does anyone have a reliable estimate for the size of our community?
I realize that it must be a difficult task separating spammers, one-shot Johnnies, etc. from the “regulars.” But how many active “regulars” would you guess or estimate we are? Do you think we total beyond 200?
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71 Answers
Circumnavigator
Visited Fluther 90 days in a row.
Awarded to 170 users
Sounds about right.
I’d say of the regular Jellies, maybe 40?
For some reason, 200 active jellies sounds high to me. (But I’ve never been great at that kind of estimating, so what do I know! Aha.)
But now I’m curious, too, to know if there’s a way to find out how many active users there are currently—and also how that compares to previous years.
Edit—@jca‘s estimate seems closer to whatever the right number is.
Also, @RedDeerGuy1, I like your strategy, but the total users awarded the circumnavigator award would stretch back to whenever that award was first put in place. Also, as far as I’m aware, the award has been broken for at least a year.
I think the most simple and accurate way would be to make a list of people who visit the site at least every few days, and also include those who we’ve maybe not seen in a week or a month but may still be considered “active.”
You can make another roll call.
^^ one where everyone agrees to make only one comment, to make tallying easier!
Yes just remember there are some (like the friend in Hawaii and the friend in the mid-west) who are part of the community but maybe haven’t been here for a week or two.
I think @johnpowell has some kind of program or algorithm that tracks the users on here. At least he had one some time back.
Or the long way would be to visit say the last 20 questions that were asked and list each person who commented on them (except for spammers).
I think “roll call” is great but not everyone is here every day.
@RedDeerGuy1 I’ve been on here for quite a few years, and was finally thinking I might get Circumnavigator this summer, but something (guests, I think) had me not visit one day, so nope, still don’t have it.
Maybe a roll call with a specific date to start and end the count. Give it 2 or 3 months, explain that it is for a count, and for Jellies to only answer once. Pick someone like Johnpowell to do the count.
Does Circumnavigator or Channel-Crosser even work? I know I haven’t missed a day in quite a while, but have never been awarded Channel-Crosser.
90 days straight is the sort of dedication that defies credulity. How many of you have managed to achieve this distinction?
I’m guessing maybe me, @stanleybmanly, but I may have missed a day (but I don’t think so).
@stanleybmanly Raises hand. Never missed a day since my previous avatar of Talljasperman to now.
I’m impressed! Think I’ll dash over to desktop to check my own “combat ribbons and badges.”. Though I know for a fact that I can’t possibly have been here for 90 days straight.
I just checked awards and I find it hard to believe, with the frequency that I visit Fluther, that I’ve never received Circumnavigator in the 10 years that I’ve been here.
I think a lot of the awards are broken.
I sure didn’t make it. Like I said, 90 days in a row is a significant feat! Broken how? You mean there are folks being deprived of due recognition?
I know the day-count awards are broken for sure, at least they were whenever it was I tried to get the 30-day one. (Found out in a thread shortly after 30 days that it was broken!)
As for the OP: I tallied up any username that showed up on threads from today through Sept. 8th. I got 97 names! A few of them were newer users or users who hadn’t been active for a while before their latest question/comment, but I included them anyway, because—optimism. Also, am I allowed to post a photo of the list for people to see, and if we really want a Fluther census, for people to add to?
Stopping at the 8th was fairly arbitrary. I just didn’t want to keep going any longer.
@Mariah
Hopefully that breakage includes the Perfecto-fish. I don’t an award to tell me I’m neurotic. ;-p
@chyna :: And I did do that. I downloaded every question for that last month as a html file and then did grep and wc stuff to list every user that answered a question and then it listed how many answers they posted that month and then listed them in order of the most answers to the least.
Some people got very pissed about that. Like they thought it was a huge invasion of privacy. I will not be doing that again.
I would have been here 90 days in a row @stanleybmanly. I might not post, but I’ll look in and see what’s here.
I haven’t checked, but I don’t think I’ve been awarded the circumnavigator or channel-crosser. I also don’t think those rewards are working properly.
Well, at least you tried @JP!
@Earthbound_Misfit :: I thought it was interesting data. It is just funny the people that were upset the most were at the top of the list for number of answers. Infer what you want from that tidbit.
People are strange @JP. Jim told us that.
@johnpowell: I’d post it anyway if I were you. If they get mad about it, so be it.
I know for myself, I am on here multiple times every day. It’s a big part of my online activity. I don’t always post or ask, I’ll often just “follow” but I’m here.
I too wonder why anyone would find fault with their appearances here being tabulated. I have always assumed that such data would be readily available to anyone willing to exert the effort involved in collecting it. Worse than that, there are surely programs available that can harvest such data on each of us as a matter of routine. We may be a small group, but this is a public forum.
I counted about 12 different users in this thread.
I’m here.
@johnpowell I remember when you did that. I thought your method was genius!
Fluther is quality not quantity.
If we did a roll call, it would get buried under other questions in a few days. We would have to repost it at least every week.
FINISHED 2017–09-14 03:10:01
Total wall clock time: 1h 30m 8s
Downloaded: 3547 files, 152M in 2m 47s (934 KB/s)
main@rufusNEW:~/fluther$
WE NOW HAVE DATA..
See?! This is why you’re my hero! ;-)
(Seinfeld has nothing to do with it.)
Is there a way to give numbers without mentioning names? We’d all trust your analysis and estimates.
It would also be interesting and informative for users to understand how many spammers the mods have to kill.
They are also heros!
Just some initial number crunching.
Out of the 3547 questions I grabbed 1014 have been deleted. This number is shockingly high. Like really amazingly high.
main@rufusNEW:~/fluther$ cat * | grep -c “This question has been deleted”
1014
edit :: Somewhat shocking in the other direction is only 993 comments were modded. I thought that would be much higher.
@johnpowell how far back does the 3547 questions go? 1,014 from Hyderabad seems like an awful lot, but they have been pretty active the last few months. There were a few days in the last few weeks where we seemed to have close to 20 washer machine/microwave repair center questions every morning.
I started downloading from question 200000 which was March 31st, 2017.
I like my numbers like I like my butts. ROUND
Out of the 2533 questions that survived there were 46160 answers/comments. 45167 of them survived. So .022% of the responses are modded. That seems pretty good actually. And about 95% of those occur in threads where over ten comments are modded.
Can you determine the number of discreet, or is it discrete, or is it both) users who commented more than say 5 times during that period? Would that give a good estimate for the size of the community?
That is doable. I’m trying to remember how I did that last time. I remember it was a bit convoluted.
grep doesn’t really do wildcards so that complicates things. And I am shit at awk and sed.
Right now I have this running and it is so very slow.
time grep ”<img class=\“avatar\” width=\“40\” height=\“40\”” >> fuuuck.txt
And I am not sure that will actually do what I want.
I’m stupid. I forgot to specify a source. So the shit just hung. After I gave it a source it took. 0.162 seconds.
sort /Users/johnpowell/Desktop/fluther.txt | uniq -c | sort -nr > /Users/johnpowell/Desktop/flutherBalls.txt
We now have numbers.
Exactly 208 people have posted over five answers since March 31 2017.
So your guesses were pretty much spot-on.
I have typed 449 answers since then.
Most answers typed are 3726. Second place is 2223. Only ten people have typed over a thousand answers. 31 people are over 500. 85 are over 100.
208 people! I way underestimated!
I’m curious now if there’s a way to see how many users posted on five+ (or however many) different threads? I can think of a few users who asked only one question, and responded to comments within that thread… but then again, I don’t think that would significantly effect the estimate, and it’s probably harder to figure out, so never mind, just a thought on my part.
Also thank you jp!
I’m all for seeing the list (I have to admit I’m curious) but I also have a pretty good idea of where I am on the list and it doesn’t bother me, so I guess I shouldn’t be the one to ask.
You are #50 with 291 answers. You have a good balance of life and whatever the hell this is.
And I could crunch those numbers but it is messy and I really don’t want to. There is garlic bread that needs to be eaten.
LOL! Thanks :) Enjoy your garlic bread!
Oh.. I should add that 416 members have posted and their answer still remain.
@johnpowell “Infer what you want from that tidbit.”
What pissed people off about posting all that data is that people would infer what they wanted from that tidbit.
It’s entirely possible to answer the question (how many) without posting people’s names, so why do that? People interact with a public site after having determined how their data is going to be shared – collecting, analyzing, and posting data with usernames attached in ways that those users cannot predict and have no control over is not okay.
And sure, individuals can chime in “I don’t mind” – and they will – but they don’t speak for everyone.
All of this data is freely available on your profile. jp isn’t digging up anything that isn’t already publicly available.
@Mariah No one can visit my profile and see my ranking for participation on this site.
Again, your comment does a good job of indicating that you do not mind if anyone shares this information. It does not speak for me or anyone else. No user should make decisions about displaying other users’ data with their usernames attached.
@dappled_leaves JP is not visiting “your profile”. He is gathering info from the site in general, the same place the info is gathered for the “profile”. All the info is on the site, and people can find your Profile
They can visit your profile and see how many responses you’ve left, and they can visit anyone else’s profile to see how many responses they’ve left, and determine a ranking that way. JP is only aggregating freely available info.
Sorry you’re bothered.
@dappled_leaves: There are other ways of compiling the information, (as I mentioned one way above), maybe not so accurately but still, just by visiting recent questions and listing who was on them. Some who are on recent questions are no longer here, so that’s another way of this method not being so accurate, but I think there’s no perfect method. Still, it’s all available from the site, not anything secret.
I actually outlined every single step with lines of commands or screenshots. Anyone could reproduce what I did if they simply followed along.
There is no voodoo.
@JP, you did, but for me that was sheer gibberish :D. I think it’s nice you shared, but I couldn’t replicate that if my life depended upon it!
I don’t know why people are having trouble comprehending this. When anyone joins an online community, such as Fluther, they have an opportunity to look around, see what information is publicly available to members and non-members, and decide whether or not they are comfortable with having that information shared. Is this hard to understand? No. Okay.
So, I make a choice about participating here, based on that information. Then someone comes along, and compiles statistics on the members. Maybe they want to know how often people participate. Maybe they want to know how often specific people use the word “fuck” or the word “liberal” in their posts. Maybe they want to know how often specific people respond to other specific people. All of this information is public. I get that. I’m not an idiot.. But compiling and publishing statistics that describe a user’s behaviour, when there is nothing on the site that indicates your behaviour might in future be subject to scrutiny on another user’s whim, removes my ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to participate on that public forum.
Statistics describing any user’s behaviour on the site should not be published with names attached without those users’ permission. This is the kind of thing Terms of Agreement statements are for. This is their purpose.
The casually dismissive attitude on this thread disgusts me. I get that the thing wasn’t done with harmful intent, but it would be nice to at least see an apology or an “I see your point of view”. Thanks for nothing, collective.
I see your point of view. This question was initially about the size of the group. But I’m curious. Now that it’s evident thst our behavior here can be tracked, does yhe revelation dampen your willingness to participate?
No apologies from me. I didn’t really share anything. As far as I know I only shared info on people that asked or was data that couldn’t identify you.
If you are concerned about the screenshots that is just a linear pull of data. As far as I know question number 200000 was about pineapple on pizza and the people in that question really care about pizza. That info isn’t a trend.
And I got a good belly 1augh out o2 the fact someone probably bitched about my numbers on Fac8book.
I don’t really care about any of this because I’m rarely here anymore, but I do understand Dappled’s point so I thought I’d chime in with support. I agree the dismissive posts are unsettling.
I’d also like to make a correction. We have the ability to choose who sees what on our profiles. I don’t have my answers available for others to see and I have a small collection of questions available to see. I chose to have most of my questions hidden. So there’s that.
@jonsblond: There are other methods of compiling the information without going to each profile and looking at specific questions and responses (again, my posts above is one example).
I understand that. I’m only saying you can’t just go to a profile and see all the answers and questions like some above stated.
The data has already been deleted since I did this on my plex server and every bit is precious so I can cram more Mindy and Veep on the server. I have no interest in compiling data about you. I wouldn’t even know how to monetize it and and I don’t fucking care.
But totes show pics of your kids on Facebook. Tossers
I don’t think anyone is worried about you so chill. ^
Veep is the best.
Thanks for that outline @johnpowell . It’s interesting to see that there are more active posters than I might have guessed.
I actually logged my 90 days independently, several years back. When I achieved the 90 days in a row, I waited for the award to show up…and waited…and waited. Finally, after about 10 minutes days, I contacted the Mod Manager. She cracked her whip and told me that the Circumnavigator award had been broken for some time.
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