I'm curious

[Van]

Financialy speaking has satelliteguys.us made it above the line? How well is our rapidly growing community doing these days? Also I notice the ever increasing member count but what are the stats for consistancy in registered members coming back again and again? I am a stickler about the misleading concept of "registered members" because really it is not a fair representation of actual numbers and is a long standing arguement I have with another non satellite fan based site and a handful of people as to the fact that it does not truely depict the actual number of members of any given site, just the amount of registered accounts.

The problem I see with registered accounts is that you will always have people that have more than one account just as I have here due to a registration problem I ran into 3 years ago and with a game site that I have multiple accounts on because I want to boost my characters. But the other thing about them is that they do not reflect the actual traffic pattern of each person and what the daily flow into the site is of these people or to use a more known term "churn".

 

[charper1]

I have seen this at other sites too, they usually purge accounts from the system that are say 6 - 9 mos with no logins. I wonder if that happens here, and it would be a great idea; helps keep an open, honest and realistic DB of active accounts.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

We are doing ok financially I guess, still trying to work off paying for the new server and also saving up for a second one. It seems like a process that never stops.

We like the other sites do not purge the userlists. As an owner you never want to remove members from your count, its a poor business decission. However in the same regard our numbers do speak for themselves when you look at our stats. And the number of unique visitors and number of page loads are what matters to advertisers.

 

[iafirebuff]

You have my support! I get much more information from here than I could from any other source, and you are cheapier than a crummy magazine

 

[Van]

Thanks Scott for the reply and its honesty.

 

[Hall]

We like the other sites do not purge the userlists. As an owner you never want to remove members from your count, its a poor business decission.

No, it's a way to keep your "membership" number growing and growing. Safe to say, if someone hasn't visited in 12 months or more, there's little chance of them coming back. If they do, you think they remember the username they chose ?? Seems plenty of other sites are okay with making a "poor business decission (sic)" in order to provide accurate member counts....

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

What are these plenty of other sites?

When you see AVS do it please let me know.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

Yeah, certainly there are not 57,000 people coming to the site on a regular basis, but they are still members, and can come back whenever they want to. I don't see anything wrong with keeping the lists. And if you look at the membership page by post count, you will find active members throughout the 1000 plus pages.

But with 2500 posts a day, this is one heck of an active community. Thats what makes it so vibrant - and such a fun place to spend your time online.

 

[tbenning]

I'll throw out some site data that may help to answer your questions...

SatGuys.us numbers:
In the past year more than 34,000 registered members have visited. (59% of members)

For comparison purposes DBSTalks numbers look like this:
In the past year more than 16,700 registered members have visited. (59% of members)

AVSForum numbers look like this:
In the past year more than 103,000 registered members have visited. (35% of members)

TivoCommunity's numbers:
In the past year more than 30,800 registered members have visited. (23% of members)


As you can see the numbers are very close for SatGuys and DBSTalk with both sites having 59% of the registered members visiting within the past year while AVSForum only saw 35% of their members visit in the past year. TivoCommunity only had 23% of their registered members visit in the past year.

 

[navychop]

Actually, the names should stay on the rolls.

There are sites where I'm registered that I visit less often. I generally do not log in there if I'm just reading. I'll log in only to post. DSLReports, for example- my interests have changed, and I spend more time here, rarely going there. Same for an RV site, and a diesel truck site. I use several PCs for surfing.

I still remember renting a movie from a big name chain a few years ago. The paperwork was excessive. I didn't go back for, I think, just over 3 months. They had purged my name and demanded I redo all the paperwork. I blew up and walked out. One less piece of plastic to carry around.

We don't need to care less about our less frequent visitors, or the ones that don't always log in.

 

[Anole]

I have auto log in turned on, and whenever I browse any of the many forums I read, they see me as a returning member.
(I understand not everyone likes that option.)
By browsing 'em daily (and I do), I show up as an active member instead of just a guest.

However, if I read a forum quite a lot (like this one) and had to manually log in to post every few days, that'd p1$$ me off to no end.


As for purging old accounts...
If someone hasn't logged in within the last year, I can see sending them an email.
If no login within a month of that, then purge their account name to free it for others.


As for comparing to how AVSforum runs, I hardly consider them any yardstick to be measured by!
There is so much fluff and crap on that forum!
They have long run-on threads with hundreds of pages (that's 3000+ posts!) , where you cannot find anything useful...
...and are a blight on the entire forum community!

The solution for which is simple:
Purge any post over a month (week?) old that is of the nature of any of the following:
1) "I think I'll order one of those."
2) "I have ordered one, and am waiting delivery."
3) "I got mine delivered, and I'll post more about it when I get it running."
4) Any question, which is answered in the next post by quoting the question.
5) Pretty much any question that is over a month old.
6) Any question that is asked multiple times.
7) Any off-topic hyjinks (they're cute for now, but a month later, anyone reading the thread won't care).
8) Any comments concerning delivery delays of my xxx piece of equipment.

Most of the above do not show up on SatelliteGuys.US forums.
However, the incessant arguing about HiDef quality and the resultant insults and dialogs, needs to be curbed.
.