"Members: 19,139" is misleading/false.

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I don't think you have to actually be a member to post in general..only in the member sections...so I would imagine that we have many posts on WP from people who are not actual members? Is that right or do you have to join to post but you can look in all but member forum?

This sort of thing is not confined to the internet.

There are public social clubs that have members who are not active more than perhaps the first time or so right after signing up.

Look at the census in American cities.... every 10 years an attempt is made to be as accurate as possible but there is no way to accurately count all the people and know when some have left but others have moved in.

I'm just trying to say that with any organization which counts members, the number presented will pretty much always be fluctuating.

Same thing here.

I have always accepted the fact that any website that displays it's membership count is likely to be showing an inaccurate number.
I figure it's pretty close and for the most part I don't really care.
Same thing here.
Even though the membership count is reported in other locations on the internet or news services, it does reflect the number of memberships opened.

Yes, I just remembered/realised that this doesn't necessarily show actual activity.

But the number of "hits" ( which the site does collect, but we don't see them usually) does; it refers to the number of posts/threads visited while online, which would indicate to some extent what the activity levels are; how many members have more than 1000/500/100 etc hits a week etc.

PS: if anyone wants to know, the post-figures I quoted above ( on pg 1 ) are from the "Browse Users" function on your account page.

Last edited by ouinon on 25 May 2008, 2:34 am, edited 3 times in total.

You have to join to post.

Last edited by ouinon on 25 May 2008, 2:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

Way cool

Beat you to it.

Yep, you must have been still typing when I hit the reply button.

1. Why do we have a person with 3 posts telling us how membership of WP should be handled??

2. Why couldn't the OP make thier posts with thier usual WP account?? (It's the curse of the cowardly sockpuppet)

Well 19,000 does at least imply there are thousands who were interested about AS/autism enough to sign up. And even if only half are real and half of those learned anything, that's still thousands of people with an increased awareness.

When else in history people with ASC's been able to be aware and have any contact with thousands of others? That's probably literally never happened in the history of the world. Nearly all ASC'ers spent their entire lives thinking "I'm the only one." (And all those without access still are.)

It's also of note that this place was not set up by professionals, experts, doctors, et al but by someone with an ASC for people with ASC's. When some of the first online forums were set up I didn't understand how important that was, but, in hindisight, I get it.

I feel like I'm 100 years old saying this, but: there is a history and I wonder if the OP isn't a younger person who is taking some things for granted without realizing it.

So I don't know what point there is to this scrutiny of the 19,000 number, but I think some historical perspective is important.

The member count, @ 19,139 is just a stat and rather an abstraction - sort of a moot point. There are certainly those who register as members then choose to not post again, or maybe just very rarely. Still, they count! It's simply a consensus number, and that's valid. As far as 'active members,' well, there are many here I know that are like a 'core group.' In actuality, this is a non-issue. The member count is just a given. Doesn't really reflect activity and it's not meant to either. Some here are parents/family of one with Autism/AS, etc, and may not choose to post, for instance.

Still, I think Wrong Planet should be proud of their membership! Well done - we are a recognized community and represent Autism with 'real people' who are touched by autism. I like posts that state, in paraphrase, 'I've learned more about autism here (WP) than anywhere, from anyone.' Some of our just-for-fun posts are very insightful.
Wrong Planet serves many needs for all sorts of individuals, and that's what counts.

the online now number only counts members and visitors who have browsed the site in the last couple of minutes. It has nothing to do with whether or not people are logged in.

OK. A little bit extra, for you all.

As of when I started this post, the reported "19,139" includes "walk_the_plank" as the latest member, who is member number 19,551.

I.e. over the course of time, 412 member accounts have been deleted. Actually, deleting accounts causes hassle, because that means all their posts and PMs go, too, otherwise the database would get in a mess.

There are currently 395 banned member names. Which (if any) of these might simultaneously be deleted accounts, I can't be bothered to find out.

At this moment (or rather, when I started typing it, as I got interrupted by an hour's 'phone call), the board reports 829 online. Here it all becomes a little murky, because HTTP is a "state-less" protocol. In fact, so far as WP is concerned, it hasn't heard a peep out of me, now, for over an hour. If the power were to fail, at my end, WP wouldn't know about that. So, I could be reading a post, thinking about it, typing this reply, on the phone or sitting in darkness - the first certainly should be counted as "online", the last, I guess not. WP certainly can't tell them apart.

Next comes a major problem - how to distinguish one person online (only 81 are members, 90% are visitors) from another? The "state-less" HTML almost implies that it is impossible. In fact, there are several ways that are used to get around this. WP employs cookies, which is a fairly simple way of doing this. At Alex's end, the software keeps tracks of "active sessions". These essentially are just a number that is stored in your cookie. When you come back to access WP, if your cookie matches a session, that's a session that's still active.

Once a session has not been revisited for a few minutes (I did a "Preview", so, I saw Alex said that is what he has it configured as), the session is assumed to be over. It has nothing at all to do with whether you are logged in or not.

I always feel that the "New Yesterday: 17" statistic is more revealing. It shows how many people are putting in the effort involved in registering on WP. That "17" is not unrepresentative. Per year, it suggests over 6,000 people putting in that amount of effort, at least.

What's even more significant than the member count is the one and a half million posts.

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PS. It is now over two hours since I last made any access to the WP server. Should that be regarded as me being "offline"?

I have no idea why this is an issue.

The reason I hang out here, read other people's thoughts, consider their ideas, and throw in my own has nothing to do with the total membership number.

Personally, I couldn't care less.

So when our profile pages suddenly ( about 6 weeks ago ? , yes; April 7 2008, see third post onwards on this page of thread at: http://wrongplanet.net/postxf50625-0-15.html ) started showing our time-online and number of hits and when last logged in, etc, which got "rectified"/hidden again after about 48 hours, which was a relief to many who found it rather too revealing of their wp use, what were those figures about? What purpose do those stats serve?

How did the site "know" that I had been on for 24 minutes and made 37 hits for example, and that I was last logged in/online at 11.33 WP time, etc, if it wasn't in fact registering my presence accurately? The data did match my use. When I was on for 25 mins it said so, when I was very active looking at posts/threads it said so too with higher number of hits.

Last edited by ouinon on 25 May 2008, 11:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

Your only activity on this board thus far has been to whine about membership standards. Go contribute to some other discussions for 10 000 posts or so, become a moderator, and then you can talk about how WP should be run. Until then, this site is what it is and you can take it or leave it.

Where I said "WP certainly can't tell them apart", I did not mean that it doesn't make a good guess.

On looking at my profile, I see:
Last Visit: Sun May 25, 2008 3:28 pm

The time at the moment, here, is 5:10 pm.

So, for some reason, sometime before 3:28 pm, WP decided my session had ended. I forget exactly what I was doing at that time...

...but maybe I can work it out... I used wget to grab Smelena's website, to have a look at it offline, at 2:05pm, which was shortly after starting to send her a PM about it. So, sometime inside of 1.5 hours, there, WP decided my session had ended. I sent the PM at 3:51pm, after having done some final edits and "Preview"s.

I happened to close my browser overnight.

I last rebooted this machine just less than a week ago.

The power has been on without interruption for three months.

I don't have the slightest idea if I have ever logged off (on this browser and this machine - I know I have on other machines, elsewhere, such as the library and at work).

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Where you give your figures above, all that is happening is that WP is maintaining the "session" according to the rules configured into it. I.e. Alex says that "a few minutes" is how long it will preserve its opinion that you are still around, in the same "session".

When a "session" ends, WP stores the data is has acquired during that session against the logged-in user (or, if it is a visitor's session, just throws it away). WP would also store the current session data if a user logs off.