Does anyone have a thought about this? It's been on my mind for a while: I'm constantly seeing new people join the forum, but the number of people online at any given point always seems to be about the same.

Is the Guild losing people at the same rate it's gaining them? Am I just missing out on something here?

Well, I think that the newcomers quickly lose their interest and move on could be one reason. The other could be that people like us, using the ghost mode to hide from most people so that could be another reason. Then there is sudden disappearance that we could count as due to problems IRL. So that is a few that pop out of my head.

Oh thats true, I guess it could be several different reasons. But in that case, I wish there was a better way to track the general activity of the guild over time: if people leave/go into ghost mode, etc, I have no idea if the Guild is healthy, thriving, wasting away, or whatever

Alot of them die in the fight pits while trying to prove themselves.

Seriously though, I think the Guild is fine. It's been around for yonks and it'll keep going. Lots of RPs cropping up all the time, lots of people to talk to, an active discord, ect. It's not perfect by a long shot but it's got alot going for it.

However I will say that I think alot of new people struggle finding there way around to start with, how to get a RP going here, ect. Maybe a buddy system would help.

Oh thats true, I guess it could be several different reasons. But in that case, I wish there was a better way to track the general activity of the guild over time: if people leave/go into ghost mode, etc, I have no idea if the Guild is healthy, thriving, wasting away, or whatever

It looks fairly healthy to me. I've only been here for a few days, but compared to some of the other forums that I've visited, this one appears to be thriving with constant activity. Maybe there is more that is happening beneath the surface that I, as a newcomer, don't really know about, but it definitely looks to be healthy and thriving on the surface.

Just a newcomer looking in on the situation.

OH, to clarify, I wasn't worried about the health of the Guild per say, as I've seen the RPs still be stable and follow approximately the same bell-curve of success I've been used to since joining however long ago I joined.

Just trying to figure out the reasoning behind people joining but the number not going up, which I think has been answered tidily by yall

Old faces shift away, new faces come and proceed to go, existing faces take a break for a while and come back. I find that basically evens things out over time.

Part of why Mahz made shifts to the ghost mode so the site looked a little less dead with the pretty transparent ghost symbol showing last online instead of a general "I'm offline and I might be dead and perhaps have been for a century guild-time".

Does anyone have a thought about this? It's been on my mind for a while: I'm constantly seeing new people join the forum, but the number of people online at any given point always seems to be about the same.

Is the Guild losing people at the same rate it's gaining them? Am I just missing out on something here?

European numbers have (steadily) gone up meaning to say when I am online during European ''standard'' hours it's 130 nowadays which used to be 100. But yeah, people leave all the time. Or they just don't login when you do.

So there are a lot of factors here that can influence the overall results.

Firstly, you are correct that there are a lot of people joining as I'm seeing a list daily of maybe 6ish people a day joining and the spam filter hasn't really been that active lately. In saying that the spam filter works on IPs and select information, like URLs and duplicate posts. Meaning that it may not trip until a not actually posts (or someone new accidentally uses a weird URL or double post in their first few messages).

This means that there is a chance that some of these accounts may be what we call silent bots, bots that don't activate until later on in an attempt to avoid the regular scans that forums have on new users.

However, of the ones that aren't bots... a portion of those have jumped into PM 1x1s. We can see this as each user has a Post count and a PM count that is kept private from the public's view, and some of these users have already made it into the hundreds.

Keep in mind though that, as mentioned above, the Online members count doesn't include Invisible users, nor will it really show people who have logged into an Alt account instead of their main. The count only shows a period of 15 minutes so unless a back to back log in is used by a person with an Alt, their count will be marked as 1 instead of 2.

Staying on topic with User counts and how it's a 15 minute internal... this is a choice by Mahz instead of Dailys as I believe it helps to show current activity rather than a daily summary. When I started this post it was sitting at 164, now it's risen to 172, but in an hours time it could drop down to 80. It's too much of a variation to make the theory that the forum is gaining or losing activity and even without these figures there's a lot happening in real life that may impact the overall activity. Halloween is on around this time, Thanksgiving is coming up, and I know Australia has all their exam periods starting soon too. This time of year does get a bit slow and last year's NaNoWriMo distracted a few people too.

Pretty much I wouldn't worry too much about the numbers and figures at this point in time. Yeah they're important but if you use one form of data to judge a forum's activity then you miss out on countless info that may be playing behind the scenes.

@NuttsnBoltsthanks for the clarification: it's clear there's a lot of stuff I'm not privy to that affects overall guild activity.