Magic Number (Members)

[insanctus]

I have been running my site for 5 or so months and up to 208 members (which I am happy).

But I was wondering if there is that magic number, you know like the old saying the first million is the hardest after that it is easy.

Is there a magic number (or one that seems like one) that once ya hit they just all start coming in?

I thought 100 was hard, 200 seemed to come a lot faster, I figure 300 is hear very soon.

[Chris M]

Not really...

There is no real "magic number"

Just the more members you have, the more likely it is that word about your site will be spread

Satan

[insanctus]

Well I was thinking more of lines of people posting what number was the hardest (100,200,300,400)

There has to be some sort a pattern (most things numbers are)

And also what is considered to be a good number, I seen some with thousands. But that is just massive and scary.

I know if mine hit 4,000 I would run for the hills and never return.

[NTLDR]

You should judge by the number of active members and not the total. You could have thousands of members, but what if only say 50 are active?

[Velocd]

I prune my forums of inactive users everytime we reach 400 members. Then, it drops down to about 350 or so.

It's been dropping less and less though, and soon we'll have around 350 members with at least '1' post count.

There is no point in having a forum full of inactive users. Those big numbers mean nothing if there isn't an active user accounting for each one of them.

The maximum userid value for my database in the table 'user' is 2073, which means I would have had a lot of users if I never pruned, but as said it means nothing if most of them never post.

[Mephisteus]

Velocd, I do hope you check the registration date Wouldn't it be lame if a user signed up and you prune right after that? :P

And yes, the start is hardest. if you got a board with a good crew, 10 very active members, 20 decent active members. You know it's good and will grow soon (happend to a board I was on).

After 100, 1000 is hardest, cause that's the next thing you pay attention to. After 1000, 5000 is hardest. Then 10.000, 20.000 etc. etc. etc.

[Velocd]

Of course I don't just prune based on post count, there are other conditionals such as last activity & registration date, that I follow by.