What is happening to the forum Stats.

[dgs]

Could someone please explain this.

According to our forum stats we have 479 members and 346 new members have joined this year.

If we add up all the new members over the last 11 years they come to over 1800?

[nigelb]

What exactly do you want explaining Dave?

[countrypaul]

When I look at the members - it shows 497 but only 19 appear to have registered this year - how did you get 346?

[dgs]

Paul and Nige, on the more stats page, scroll down to the bottom and it gives you yearly stats, look at the number of new members each year.

[countrypaul]

Looking at the members list and looking at the More Stats page, the result certainly do not agree imho. I suspect the stats are wrong, but I have no idea why.

Could be a simple as a mistake in an SQL statement, or could be bug in the actual software, or any number of other things, unlikely be be unix time wrap as that is not due to 2038 and if it was a simple signed/unsigned problem would have been seen before 50 years had passed.

[Tony]

If you look through the history of registrations there are a couple of months where the number of people joining jumps dramatically (into the 100s).
This corresponds with either us relaxing the registration anti-spam measures, or bots finally getting past the registration questions  (what happens is that one human answers the questions into a database of "known questions/answers" and then the bots use this to register, so we have to periodically update the questions).

The consequence of all this is that sometimes we have a lot of new users register.  We have to approve the accounts before they can post on the forum, and at this stage any obvious spam ones get deleted (we have tools that check yet another database of known spam users/IP addresses, so it's not hard to spot them!).  Since they get deleted this leaves the difference you're seeing between registrations and actual numbers of users.

[dgs]

Thanks Tony.

[Keef]

I find it strange that over 100 members have bothered to sign up but, according to the stats, have never logged in since.

[DavidA]

This happens often.

It seems that around 50% of newly signed up members on any site don't return to contribute or even to just look around.