Marching to a million members

[happygeek]

Yay, the DaniWeb membership ticker just went over 900,000 :)

[Narue]

Yay, 1 million members, with 999,000 of them being one-off posters, banned spammers, or lurkers who add no value. :icon_rolleyes: I fail to see the benefit of fluffing the member count with shit and then bragging about it.

[Xlphos]

Got to be good for advertising though.

- Hope I'm In that 1000.

[jon.kiparsky]

No, it's not good for advertising because anyone even vaguely serious about advertising here is going to know without looking that the number is bogus, and that counting everyone who's ever created an account gets you a completely useless number. At best, they ignore it. If they're smart, they read that as a sign saying "we inflate our membership numbers, check everything we say very carefully".

I've never found bullshit to be an effective tactic in dealing with serious people.

[VernonDozier]

Ditto Narue and Jon. One million members is a bad thing, not a good thing.

As a side, but related note, I just got an e-mail from Dream in Code very similar to what Dani posted. Apparently they got hit by the same Google update. Relevant sections in red. If I recall correctly and I am interpreting correctly, Daniweb says that they cannot legally delete threads and users, so is Dream In Code breaking the law here? Or is this just a Daniweb policy? Anyway, if it's legal, it seems like a good idea, but at the same time probably a real nightmare too adminitratively. How does one delete the useless threads/users, but not delete the non-useless responses?

Heya...,

Side Note: I'm so frustrated right now. I just typed out this long detailed email about what's been going on and some things I could really use your help with, and when I submitted it, FireFox crashed. So now you'll get the short and sweet version (probably better that way anyway). Thanks for taking a few moments to read this, it's important.

Alright, here's the low down. A couple weeks ago Google rolled out a major update that basically destroyed the rankings for Dream.In.Code and several other sites like ours. All of our best tutorials, code snippets, and questions/answers that have been a resource for millions of people for years and years were pushed down and replaced by less informative content in many cases. These are tutorials and answers you and so many of our members put countless hours in to. Overall, Google's update was good, but for a lot of sites, rather than just get rid some of the bad pages, they punished the entire site. Dream.In.Code got lumped in with those sites even though we have tons of unique, informative tutorials, code snippets, and questions/answers written by folks like you.

So over the last couple weeks, I've cleaned up literally 25,000+ topics going back 10 years to try and get rid of a lot of the "crap" if you will (because let's face it, we all know out of 200,000 topics, not all of them are the greatest questions/answers). And for the last several months (before the Google update even occurred) we've been aggressively removing the "Gimme Teh Codez" and other junk that drove a lot of us insane. Those efforts have been redoubled and I've implemented more changes to improve questions and answers. Over the last week or so, things have really improved and we're noticing better, more advanced questions, and we're getting rid of the crap much faster.

So here's where I need your help with, and I need your help now more than ever. Dream.In.Code is becoming a better place to ask questions and get help, so I need you to ask some good questions, and help provide great answers. Answers that are in-depth, include links and references, and would be a great resource for someone in the future with the same question. Submit tutorials about what you're passionate about (even if I have to create a new category for it), many of our tutorials have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. Share what you're interested in right now! And if you find topics that are crappy, "gimme teh codez", or spam... click the "Report" button so we can get rid of them quickly!

I know there are other places to get help and answer questions. We don't have millions of dollars in funding, but we do have a great group of passionate, intelligent developers who help and learn because they enjoy it, not because of some alpha-geek popularity contest. And Dream.In.Code is becoming a better place every day. In the last month, we've rolled out several new features including forum/language specific syntax highlighting, faster page loads, easier ways to find topics you started/replied to, and many other improvements.

We need your help now more than ever. Please continue to be part of Dream.In.Code. Ask questions. Provide great answers. And share your suggestions. I'll do my best to make it an even better place for you to spend your time. And thank you for all of your contributions past and future!

Have a great weekend, and thank you again,
Dream In Code

[Dani]

> We legally are not allowed to remove users from our database
> It is a DaniWeb policy to not remove posts/threads that do not violate our rules, because doing so would break conversations and is unfair to the people who spent their time contributing to the threads, and for the web visitors who are following the threads

[jon.kiparsky]

> We legally are not allowed to remove users from our database

Hrm? On what grounds?

[royng]

About the one million members wished, i am confident daniweb will achieve it soon. But out of the 1 million less than 10 000 are active that means they only post one time and quit daniweb. So what is the point

[happygeek]

Blimey, sorry for being passionate about DaniWeb and getting excited about something :(

[royng]

Its ok. I get what you mean. So it seems that you guys are setting a record of having a million members. Good luck in achieving that. I think you could achieved that in 2 - 3 years time

[WaltP]

2-3 years? Boy, you are new here.

[royng]

Yeah, you could say so WaltP. I join only this year and do not have much experiment. Do you mean that Daniweb could actually achieved 1 million members in a shorter time

[WaltP]

Wouldn't surprise me.

[royng]

Why, at this rate there are like only a hundred or less members a day joining daniweb. Maybe at the end of the year there would be 1 million members, is that what you are saying

[VernonDozier]

900,166 today. Supposedly 898,893 ten days ago. "Goal" is a million. I don't feel like doing the math, but it would be several years at this rate. However I think this slow rate is an anomoly (sp?). On the "plus" side, we have someone named "spoon licker" who just joined a few days ago, so let's make sure he's included in the total. And iamthwee created a hundred or so fake accounts a ways back. If Rashakil Fol gets bored again and creates another script, we'll meet the goal in no time...:icon_rolleyes:

[jonsca]

Why, at this rate there are like only a hundred or less members a day

Wait until it becomes exam time at the universities. I couldn't quantify the surge, but there definitely is one.

[Ancient Dragon]

I believe that number also includes all the spammers and porn posters and wouldn't be a bit surprised if they account for about half or more the total membership. Maybe Dani should just delete all those accounts and see what happens to the total membership.

[happygeek]

To be fair, while we do have the same problems with spammers as any other large forum to suggest that more than half of the total historical membership is made up of them is pretty ridiculous...

[Ancient Dragon]

Well, the proof is in the pudding. You may be right, but never know until the spam accounts are removed. Of all the new accounts created over the last month how many were spammers? That sample should be easy to determine.

[jon.kiparsky]

to suggest that more than half of the total historical membership is made up of them is pretty ridiculous

How so? That's about what Wikipedia cites as a "conservative estimate" of the proportion of spam in email traffic worldwide, why would DaniWeb be any different? And why would it matter? The number of people who have ever signed up to a particular forum is only marginally interesting, it's really a pretty trivial example of accumulation in action.

[royng]

About the spam accounts, i am sure there are a pretty lot out there. Some posters will just put a smiley face there and say they agreed tot the previous poster suggestion. And i have calculated it is impossible to achieve 1 million members by the end of this year. Unless a miracle occurred and the half the world is having problems with their computer then maybe more people will join daniweb to have their problem solve

[VernonDozier]

>> And i have calculated it is impossible to achieve 1 million members by the end of this year.

The site only started in 2002 or something, presumably with 0 members, and it's 90% there, so it might make it. 9 months is a long time. They'll need 400 new members a day, roughly, but like Jonsca said, wait till exam time comes. Whether it's desirable is another matter.

>> Unless a miracle occurred and the half the world is having problems with their computer then maybe more people will join daniweb to have their problem solve

No miracle required. Half the world (hell, all the world) already is having problems with their computers right now.

Just saw the Wikipedia article.

As of October 2010, over 800,000 people have become members (20% of the members have contributed over a million posts). However, many believe that DaniWeb boasts inaccurate member counts, due to a policy that they never delete or deactivate accounts, and therefore a member who registered years ago but hasn't returned to the site since, will still be counted as a community member.

Does that mean 80% have NO postings?

[royng]

Maybe 80% are not active members of daniweb, maybe they only have less than 5 post

[jon.kiparsky]

The math still doesn't quite work - 80% of 800,000 is 640,000 - if we take off the million posts supposedly made by 20%, that leaves only 450,000 for the 80% to have made, and that's at today's posting totals. Using today's membership numbers (900,000, 80% = 720,000) the disparity is even greater.
Gosh, something that's not quite right on wikipedia? Who'da thunk it?

[royng]

Maybe the guy fail his maths

[jon.kiparsky]

Yeah, that could be. Or he's just making stuff up. (where'd he get the 80%/20% split, anyway?)

[royng]

Yeah, maybe some random guy doing a research on daniweb but give false information to the media and public. Go and sue him

[Ancient Dragon]

The math still doesn't quite work - 80% of 800,000 is 640,000 - if we take off the million posts supposedly made by 20%, that leaves only 450,000 for the 80% to have made, and that's at today's posting totals. Using today's membership numbers (900,000, 80% = 720,000) the disparity is even greater.
Gosh, something that's not quite right on wikipedia? Who'da thunk it?

What??? The article says 20% of DaniWeb contributed to 1,000,000 posts (I'm assuming that doesn't include deleted spam posts). What are all those other numbers you tossed around? 80% of 900,000 is the estimated number of active members and is a completely different issue. You are mixing apples and oranges.

[jon.kiparsky]

AD, one of us is confused. I'm open to the possibility that it's me.

What numbers do you think I'm mixing? As I see it, it's a simple grade school word problem. In short:
(80% * 800,000) > (1.45 million - 1 million)

In long:

If there are 1.4 million posts, and 20% of Daniweb contributed 1 million of them, then .4 million of them were contributed by 80% of the membership, right? In the same way, if there's a $1.4 million in the room, and $1 million belongs to 20% of the people, that leaves $.4 million for the remaining 80%.

So if you have 1.4 million posts, and 20% of them come from 1 million people, and only one person can contribute a particular post, what is the maximum possible membership? It's the number of which .4 million is 80%, or .5 million. So if the claimed membership is greater than .5 million, that statement can't be true.

That's the logic I used. I don't know what the total number of posts in October 2010 was, but it was less than today's, which is 1.45 million. The article claims that DW population was 800K, so it can't be true, since to be true for 800,000, you would need 1.64 million posts: (80% *800,000) = (1,640,000 - 1,000,000)

But I was never very good at math, so I'll buy that I may have fumbled the calculation somewhere.

[Ancient Dragon]

>>So if you have 1.4 million posts, and 20% of them come from 1 million people
That's an incorrect assumption. 20% of the total post count (200,000) come from the top 35 or so members (see Total Members by Rank link)