Because simply browsing the Perlmonks site is a perfectly valid activity not captured by your stats, I think that the ratio of writers to readers is even more extreme that you portray it. But that is ok. If every visitor of PM felt compelled to submit a node, I think the result would be pandemonium.

I don't know of any participatory website statistics, but I suspect they would be similar to PM. To answer your question, ask yourself: How many websites do I visit that allow participation vs. websites that I actually participate in? For me over the span of months it is hundreds vs. 2.

Thanks,
     Good point, I never considered people that just read without ever logging in. I must admit for a long time (~years) I did the same thing with Slashdot, I read it religously, but rarely if ever comment. So point taken dead users is probably not the best description.
     Thanks for the input.

Regards Paul

I read Slashdot several times a week, but would be classified as a 'dead' user because I never registered and never posted a comment.

No, that doesn't make you a 'dead' user. It makes you a non-user. People who have not registered are not counted in the statistics.

We're building the house of the future together.

I would say that the 81% figure is very typical for websites of this genre. I have a reasonably sized website for graphic artists and photographers with about 133k users over the past 3-4 years. I also see exactly 81% 'dead' users (accounts not used in the last 30 days).

I would say that the percentage of active users is going to mainly be dependant on the time that the site has been opperational as well as the site genre (to a lesser extent).

You'll notice that out of 4263 PAUSE ids, 1819 were never used to upload anything. That's over 42% inactive accounts.

Not exactly 81%, but that's probably because a PAUSE id has to be aproved, while a perlmonks account hasn't (which is a bit scary... almost 2000 people had plans, announced them, got their ids approved and... gave up?)

But I don't think there's anything to worry, though. I have subscribed sites myself that I never got to use, has have many around here, probably.

Did anybody else notice someone already released a module in 2026? Interesting...


----
Zak - the office

Yes.

I used to know which module that was...

The problem arises because whatever is parsing those modules just pays attention to the time of the files in the distribution... and apparently somebody thought it was a good idea to have his/her computer ahead of time :-)

And did you see the last graph? There is one dist being uploaded in 2026! So far for statistics.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

Every now and then this issue comes up amongst the gods and pmdev and we usually say that we will dispose of the "dead" accounts and then never quite get around to it. The only reason I personally would like to nuke those accounts is because usernames are unique and those 20k id's that are lost to the logged in once never posted crowd are thus unavailable for real users, and personally id prefer real users have priority for the cool accounts.

One of these days one of us will have to wipe out those accounts.

Just as long as you leave Friar paco and his famous post How do I recursively process files through directories :-)

updated

Added Friar paco's honorific in agreement with Anonymonk. Guess I will have to keep an eye on this node now and update as he progresses through the ranks (Friar paco that is, not Anonymonk)

Cheers,
R.

Pereant, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!

That's Friar paco to you, Bishop Walk.

Artist,
     I agree PerlMonks is a great site as I have been helped by those who have a far greater understanding and insight into topics than myself on many occasions and helped fast too.
     I was not trying to cast a negative light on PM or the frequency of use, quality or material or users etc, it just got me thinking about how user activity in general on the web is. I know when you take into consideration the genre, quality of information and whether you can access this information without logging in will skew the results, but am curious to see if there are any similarities.

Regards Paul

You didn't have to "sign up" to get an account; the bot would recognize you by nickname for basic statistics and would learn any new player as soon as they answered a question in the course of the game. The focus was ease of involvement for players. You had to set up a password and authorize to use special features of your account, though.

With the transient nature of IRC, and the network involved, we were getting 800-1000 new player accounts per day.

Since accounts were as cheap as candy to create, and I didn't want newcomers to build on the statistics of old unused players, I implemented a tiered pruning mechanism.

If you had less than 5 points (easy first-day total) and you hadn't been seen for a week, you were erased. These players probably wouldn't even notice that the point system existed, nevermind care, if they returned.

Other tiers were also measured on how many points per month of inactivity, and/or any special clues such as special privileges. Over a certain threshold, the game system just sent a message to an administrator to unlock the user for reaping, and wouldn't reap otherwise.

Back to perlmonks (and other create-an-account websites): I am kind of annoyed that all the "logged in once, no writeups" usernames are off-limits for other people who could be great contributors. I would like to see the site prune most of the ancient non-contributors: if they have not logged in for six months, have not written any nodes, then reap the username and let someone else choose that name.

I'm sure there's all sorts of interesting statistical anomolies ... anomalies ... anamal .... weird number stuff. In addition to the one-time posters and the never-posted, you've got folks like me. We go into PM hibernation for a stretch of weeks or months, coming out of it long enough for a relative flurry of activity. Then we see our shadow and it's back into hibernation for another 3 months.

I guess it takes all sorts.

...dead users (81%)

How do you figure?

The only combination of those user stats that I can see gives 81% is "Logged In Once, No Write Ups" plus "Users With Write Ups".
19998 + 7177 / 33512 = 81%.

Somehow, that's not the membership slice I'd call "dead".