Posts exceed 3,500 + other stats

[John Ashworth]

There are now more than 3,500 posts on our forum, just two weeks after hitting 3,000.

We have 109 forum members.

However only around 20% of forum members have ever posted, and 98% of posts are by 10% of forum members. We hope the rest of you are avid readers!

Of the top ten posters, seven are members of the FOTR Board of Directors, which is not surprising since the Board uses a private section of the forum to conduct a lot of its business. The other three high-posting forum members are not FOTR club members.

Our overall average is 9 posts per day, and rising. In practice this means far more than 9 per day as the average obviously includes the early days when there were few forum members and few posts. During the last two weeks the average has been around 35 per day; the seven weeks before that averaged around 20 per day. The last couple of days have been particularly busy - I think there were more than 50 posts yesterday.

The forum was set up with two aims: (1) for FOTR's internal and external communications; (2) as a resource for South African and international rail enthusiasts. Let's hope that, as we begin its second year, it's beginning to fulfil both of those.

[Nathan Berelowitz]

Well done FOTR. Keep it up, keep posting.

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

Just out of interest.

[John Ashworth]

Thanks, Kevin. Nice to see it in graph form. Is there any way of showing number of posts graphically? Indeed, is there any way at all of tracking number of posts?

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

Only manually - which is how I did the above (over coffee).

[John Ashworth]

Attached is a chart showing the cumulative number of posts (x 1,000) in the months when we made a note of them. It shows a long slow rise from zero at the beginning of 2007, then accelerating rapidly since the end of 2007.

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

And the top ten posters..... Remember John and myself have posted stuff for other people (ahem CHris and Arno especially) so our posts are exaggerated ! Some of the content is exaggerated too !