A Big Mile marker

[Darren]

1001 Members! We've certainly increased our membership since I joined. Obviously everyone who has joined has seen something cool about this place. This must be a dream come true for matt. I have a message board of my own, and quite frankly, it sucks! I've had like one person start. It must have been hard at first, but your idea has spread to many places.

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-D-

[matt]

Yeah, it started out small but with a lot of work and help from Phil and shania.org spreading the word about the forums things have gone well. We've also been helped out by armando and his site, stwain.com.

More important that the number of total users is the number of great people we have here. It's our Shania community for everyone!

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Matt Hartsock
matt@shania.net
http://www.shania.net

[Justin]

Yeah congrats Matt, way to go!

Justin

[armando]

Wow... In just about a year we've grown to 1,000+ members. Groovy! http://www.shaniaforums.com/smile.gif

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Armando
http://www.stwain.com
armando@stwain.com

[Darren]

Imagine when her new cd comes out. How many new members do you think we'll have by then about 10,000. Although that would be nice, i don't think it would be as fun, because when there are TEN THOUSAND members, there are many posts, and many replys. What do you think about that?

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You've got to get yourself together~you've got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it~Don't say that later will be better now you're stuck in a moment and you can get out of it.

[Londo]

I once posted a 2 page message contemplating the 10,000 member possibility. If we make some statistical observations we get to the conclusion that from the total of members less than 20% posted at least once, less than 10% rarely come back to post again and only around 5% are regular posters. Today we have less than 50 regular posters on this board (regular poster means a person who posts more than once a few weeks). If we would extend this algorithm to the 10,000 means we’ll have around 500 regulars here. But we have to take into consideration other parameters, like the potential of ideas set by a certain topic, the frequency of messages, the time people have to read and interact, etc. If we take all of these things into consideration, we’ll get to the conclusion there will never be 500 regular posters, at least not the way things are going today. The frequency of the posts will be very big, a post at a few tens of seconds, extremely hard for people to keep up with. The topics will become saturated in a matter of hours, making people who would want to post something hold off because they would be only repeating certain ideas. There is also the probability of members forming small groups of interests, responding and reading only the messages coming from a small number of people they know and can relate to. The interactions and relationships will diminish, there will be a feeling of suffocation felt by many members.

In conclusion, in my opinion there is a limit of regular posters which is not set, will vary between certain boundaries, depending on all these factors. When that limit of saturation will be achieved, the rate of people remaining silent will start to match the rate of new people signing on and posting, all of this in a dynamic motion depending of inside and outside factors. So that limit is way below 500, but I can’t really say where it is, there are too many factors to consider in order to make an assumption.

This is probably the most unclear post I’ve ever written, but I’m in a hurry.

[Darren]

no londo! I understand. I should ask you all my questions! Although i couldn't have figured out that myself! You are dedicated to you job.