Guess-timate: How many lurkers?

I don't know if this is even possible to do, but could Percipient or Moose or one of the Admins give a rough guess at how many unique non-participants (lurkers) visit this site in a given day, week or month?The topic of lurkers has come up in a few posts recently and I have seen some posts in the past that appeal to the ever elusive lurker. I was wondering, given the amount of participant traffic on the site, how many lurkers there actually are.cheers,
M

Well, I'm one. Although this discussion is interesting enough that I read posts here a few times a week, I almost never have anything much to contribute. The only time I tried to post recently, here, it was to point out the obvious that had already been pointed out multiple times; I still managed to be partly wrong, the post was completely ignored by everybody, and the topic sputtered to a halt with amazing speed.I've got a renewed interest in physics, cosmology and astronomy, though, so I hope eventually I'll have something halfway important to say.[Edited to fix UBB code][This message has been edited by Traz, 01-14-2004]

Hi Traz,
I don't know why you would feel you have nothing important to contribute. Each person comes here to air their opinions...some come with opinions with about as much substance as air Each of us comes with our varying backgrounds and ability to express what we think so I would not feel inhibited. And it's not like any of my posts or threads have a particularly long half life or are filled with great wit I also lurked here for a couple of weeks before first posting. But I was mostly trying to get a feel for what subjects had been covered over and over and what threads proved to have the livliest or most fruitful discussions...now I just wade in wherever and annoy the Admins Cheers,
M

Please see http://EvC Forum: Site Usage -->EvC Forum: Site UsageThis data was from 12/14/03.Of the 1469 registered members, 891 had posted at least 1 message. That makes 578 who had never posted.The membership totals include some duplicate registrations, be it the same person registering from 2 different e-mail addresses, or the same person having aliases. Example: Percipient and Percy are each a member entry, even though it's the same person.We also have some (many?) members with less than valid registrations. People who have registered using invalid e-mail addresses, and thus didn't receive their password, and thus can't post member messages.Cheers,
Adminnemooseus

Is there another way to extimate lurker activity?Can we get a count of total hits in a time period and then try to determine how many hits a post or poster might generate? The delta could be taken as lurker hits.My first guess would be about 20 hits per post.<
However, it does appear that the pure lurker population is not very high at all. Much smaller than I might have though actually.
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Common sense isn't< !--UE-->[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 01-14-2004]

Thanks Moose,
As Ned points out, from this sample it suggests that the lurker population is not very large. I never expected that it was huge but I did assume that there is probably a steady flow of people stopping, reading a few posts, but not posting anything themselves....an amusing side note in this context is that Fred Williams occassionally appealed to the lurker population to take heed of what he was saying as if he was talking to the great masses

The site experiences between two and three thousand "sessions" a day. A session is defined as "a series of hits from one visitor (as defined by the visitor's IP address) wherein no two hits are separated by more than 30 minutes. If there is a gap of 30 minutes or more from this visitor, an additional Session is counted."Unfortunately, I don't think sessions can form a basis for estimating lurkers because 60-70% of all sessions last between 0 and 10 seconds, and I'm betting that most of these very short sessions are 0 seconds long, meaning they're a single hit. Contributions to this very short session category are probably varied, but since EvC Forum is searched by Google, a significant portion could very well be clicks from a Google search that didn't result in the site being explored further.The site statistics tool of our webhosting company does not provide statistics by IP address. There's an item on the to-do list to collect this statistic. I'm also hoping to change to a login format sometime this year (cookied, of course - you wouldn't have to log in to every session), and that would facilitate tracking usage.Site usage is pretty high, averaging about .6 GB/day. Another positive note: the webhosting company has doubled the amount of disk space allowed to our level account. We shouldn't have to worry about disk space for at least a couple more years.--Percy

I must note that I was only considering registered members. That info says nothing about the non-registered lurkers.started up in December of 2000. Things were pretty slow and formalized for the first year.I probibly did check out the forum very early on, and perhaps did lurk a bit heavier for a month or two before registering (as minnemooseus) in November of 2001. Once again, things were pretty slow back then. I didn't bother registering until I decided to make my first posting (btw, I believe the subject was if the dog and wolf were the same species).The activity at this forum took off at the very end of 2001. I strongly suspect this was because the precursor forum, a Yahoo club, was changed over to being a Yahoo group (along with all the other Yahoo clubs). The structure of already had a vast edge of the Yahoo club format, and the change from Yahoo club to Yahoo group format was really a turn for the worst there. Most to all of the old Yahooers abandoned the Yahoo site, in favor of this site.AM

Thanks for the clarification Percy. I was merely curious but it seems there is really not enough info available to even make a guess at how many lurkers are lurking on average....you got more server space? Does this mean I can increase my portion of mindless babble?

Hi Moose,
I am not sure how you mean it but do you consider EvC a step down from the old Yahoo groups or that it was bad for the Yahoo site specifically as everyone migrated here? Just curious because if it is the former, how was it different and are there any aspects of the Yahoo groups that you want to import?
cheers,
M

I don't know much about message board software, but I suspect that this board might be using the same software that another of my regular boards uses because the appearance is almost identical except for the colors. At that other board, each thread listing shows the number of reads as well as the number of posts for each individual thread. By comparing the ratio of the two numbers to that of other threads one can get a rough idea of how many lurkers are watching and which threads they're reading. If the reads statistic is available here, it might be interesting if it were shown.

I'm two.Haven't really had much to contribute.

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Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!