Quicksand Fans

I did the math. 12938 Members. - 10,851 have 0 posts.

Some lurkers and many, many robots, I would guess.

I ran a board using this software many years ago and finally had to vet each new member manually to prevent the spam bots from suddenly posting randomly.

I used to clean out bogus members, but it's just not worth it. When spambots (different issue) start getting through the Q&A captcha, I update the questions. No big deal.

But the reality is that 95% of bulletin board members only lurk (and that's ok). The majority of posts are made by less than 2% of (real) members.

If I didn't have skin in the game, I would most likely be a lurker. And honestly, I don't understand how people get twisted up about these realities. Even collecting posted content (I have come to refer to it as harvesting) has been openly frowned upon - with a derogatory term for it. Again, this makes no sense to me.

This community started out by sharing stories, information and other content. It's been a prime directive ever since. Are we supposed to get together in a circle and sing Kumbaya? Seriously, if there's a higher purpose, let me know.

rhinodynamo wrote:I did the math. 12938 Members. - 10,851 have 0 posts.

Interesting but not a surprise when I alone account for over 3% of all posts. And the majority of those were made years ago.

dlodoski wrote:This community started out by sharing stories, information and other content. It's been a prime directive ever since. Are we supposed to get together in a circle and sing Kumbaya? Seriously, if there's a higher purpose, let me know.

I've been involved in numerous volunteer organizations over the last 5 decades. There's an unwritten law of 10%. No matter how many people are signed up, you'll only have about 10% who do ANYthing. And most of the work will be done by the same handful of people every time. It always tickles me in a very cynical way with one of the active people starts jumping up and down, asking "but HOW can we get them involved???"

There's wheat, and there's chaff. You literally cannot have one without the other, and the ratio is fixed at "disproportionate."

Duncan Edwards wrote: .....Interesting but not a surprise when I alone account for over 3% of all posts....

Lightweight.