IceForce said:
There's another interesting thing you could tally: Tally the thread view counts on page 1 of Off-Topic and page 1 of Gaming Discussion, and compare the totals with the tallied view count total of page 1 of
GID, and then tell me which board gets the most traffic.
(You'll probably want to disqualify any sticky threads for the purpose of this, otherwise they'll skew the results, badly.)
Well Off-Topic has 31473 views and Game Industry has 106031. But I'm not really sure that tells us much, since some of the threads in Game industry are almost a month old. It seems like both forums have different styles of activity...
Hmm, what if we compare the new threads and posts made in each forum since today:
Game Industry:
New threads: 28
New posts: 2718
Off-Topic:
New threads: 113
New posts: 4042
Judging by that, Off-Topic is still more active than Game Industry.
IceForce said:
On other forums around the internet, it's not uncommon to see people with join dates more than a decade old. There's one particular forum I also frequent where almost all of the regulars have join dates 2003-2005.
Why does The Escapist have such a (comparatively) high turnover of users? Is it because people get bored of it quickly? Is it the moderation? Perhaps it's because people tend to join this site when they're fairly young IRL, and grow out of this place after a few years.
I'm not really sure the reason...
That is a good question. I agree that all the reasons you stated are likely part of it. It could also be because the Escapist had such an influx of new users for such a long time that a tight community never really formed. There were just too many people for most people to get to know everybody, and without that sense of community there isn't a lot to keep people around long term. Or maybe I'm completely off base, I don't know, there were an awful lot of regular posters who were banned. Over a hundred that I personally recognised by name or avatar.
Barbas said:
The site's forums haven't been around for all that long. They got started some time in 2006, IIRC, which was as far back as threads with comments in will currently load for me. Earliest join date I saw was 2004, I think, belonging to someone who helped put the site together. A lot of people joined back then and simply don't post in the forums, ergo they aren't seen as much nowadays. The mute white faces are legion.
It's true that the Escapist forums didn't launch until August 2006, there was the Escapist Lounge before that, which was just the comment sections for the articles. It launched around December 2005.
As for older accounts, the Escapist launched on July 12, 2005 so any accounts made earlier than that are likely from the sister site WarCry Network which launched May 21, 1999. Escapist users were able to post on Warcry and vice versa.
LostGryphon said:
I think some people here are taking the OP a bit too seriously...
Yes, I think they are. A few people seem to be under the impression that the OP consists of anti-newbie hate speech. One person went so far as to say that I personally have made the forums a hostile place for newcomers.
Is it just me or do the forums seem to be more sensitive than they used to be? I seem to remember people making threads of a similar tongue in cheek nature several years back without everybody getting so literal about everything.
DeanCain said:
But really, what was the point of this thread? To shake your cane at the kids skateboarding in the street? I've seen no animosity against people strictly because they're new. Am I missing something?
Well, the purpose was really to point out the problem of there not being many new users coming to the site, thus the reason the majority of the OP consists of statistics.