Note: for a short summary, see the bottom.
The Old Judge wrote:Well, that statistic can be explained by this simple fact: The ToO kept many of its people early on, and those folks continue to patronize their online "home." The SS is younger, but it's gone on long enough to prove that we don't keep a lot of our members. Though this is true for the ToO as well, many of their members plunged right in, while when you look here, we have 30 posts for this guy, 200 for another, etc. A large majority of our people have come on for a short time, made lots of posts, and then vanished. Only a small percentage come on here to stay.
I disagree with this (although you have a great point), so I will do my best to make a counterargument. My opinion is that, in general, our message boards have a very low retention rate. Only a fraction of the people who join ever make above 5 posts, and a small percentage gets 300 or more. Of these, many eventually leave, either getting tired of the board or getting busy with life.
The ToO does have a very strong group of members that has been around for years. But there's also another, much larger group of people that has left, even after making thousands of posts (Shadowpaw, Fenix, EB, Doctor Watson, Jesus Freak, J-man, ect).
My theory is that the SS and ToO actually have similar retention rates for members, with the ToO's being slightly higher for several reasons. For example, I think the reason that the ToO had a large, core group of people that all joined within the first week is the Town Hall. Essentially, the non posting or short term members had already been filtered out by the previous message board, and the first people to join were already veterans. That's why there are still an impressive amount of founding members who are still active or had massive amounts of posts. In contrast, most of the SS founding members had never had message board experience, and were just trying it experimentally, having come from the Scoop or beyond. Of prominent members (defined as having 1000+ posts here), we just have Belle who joined on May 9th, whereas the ToO has Catspaw, Laurie, Top, ect. who joined on April 1st.
It's been very difficult to compare retention rates between the boards, especially because of the difference in age. For example, of users on the Soda Shop who joined within the first 2 months, there are 8 prominent members who are active. During the entire year of 2012 on the ToO, only one prominent member joined (Woody). No prominent members joined during 2013, and none have joined in 2014 as of today. This makes it annoyingly difficult to compare retention rates, because comparing founding members is biased in favor of the ToO, and it has literally no prominent members that have joined since the Soda Shop began.
I could redefine what a prominent member is, and reduce it to 500 posts. I might try that later. Instead, for now, I went back to 2011 for the ToO; it's a fairly recent time in the scheme of things, and it has a group of active, prominent members.
In 2011 from May 9th to December 31st, 6 prominent members joined the ToO. 3-4 members are still active (I'm not sure whether or not to count Grace). On the Soda Shop during 2012 from May 9th to December 31st, we had 19 prominent members join. 12 of them are still active(ish). If we compare the retention rates as a percentage, they are actually quite similar, with 4/6 being 67%, and 12/19 being 63%. Admittedly, this is a very general estimate, and "active" is hard to define. I generally just looked at the number of posts a person had recently. If it was obvious the member was just "visiting" (like Suzy) for a short time, I didn't count that as active.
Overall, I think that the ToO definitely has a core group of people that have been around for forever, and will continue to post for a long time. On the Soda Shop, that group is still emerging and being defined, but we also have dedicated members. The Soda Shop is younger, and has way more new members posting than the ToO, which has very few (just Woody, if you only count 1000+ posts). If you combined all of the posts made in the last year by new members on the ToO, you wouldn't even get one prominent member out of that.
Ending: Sorry that took so long. =p While it's just general information, I think that this shows that the two boards do not compare well, that the ToO's founding member numbers are skewed compared to those of the Soda Shop, and that the Soda Shop is a younger board that still has new members posting and becoming integrated into the board.
I know what the ToO is. I was just posting that comment on here to be dumb. Haha.