Wednesday 14 October 2009

Frequent Forum Miles

The use of the Munqui Tribe forums seems to have faded off recently. I'm not sure why that is.

The in-game activity still seems to be pretty high, with good numbers of guild members online. Usually at least 10-20, and sometimes reaching 30.
But the forum seems to be slowly dying. People either aren't bothering to read what's written on there, or they have no interest in the guild other than as a place to find groups in-game.

It's a bit of a shame, because the forums used to be a good place to have a chat, or a whinge, or just generally piss about when you were supposed to be doing something else... The good old days.

Luckily, I don't just have to tell you that this is true because I say it is. Brast was kind enough to give me Admin access ages ago, so I can pull some stats from the admin tools:

So here they are: (Keep in mind, these are only since the forum reset, where the original service provider went bust).

Registered Members: 123
Total Shoutbox Posts: 598
Total Forum Posts: 2398

Top Posters:
  • 393 - Smyth
  • 318 - Knicks
  • 184 - Night
  • 158 - Vind
  • 155 - Funk
  • 153 - Vedd
  • 139 - Bronze
  • 123 - Lewt
  • 117 - Flow
  • 106 - Rad
  • 53 - Bolle
  • 38 - Brast
  • 38 - Zuchi
  • 37 - Biafra
  • 29 - Spud
  • 27 - Grenthal
  • 21 - Rumido
  • 21 - Trig
  • 16 - Tinsell
So what do those figures tell us about the forums, and about the guild itself?

Well firstly, Apart from Tins, I only counted people who've made more than 20 posts. So thats 18 People. So out of 123 registered members only 18 of them have been 'active' on the forums. Although it depends how you define 'active'. The forums were reset at the beginning of January, so 20 Posts is still only an average of 2 per month.

Secondly, if you add up all the posts that those 18 have made, you get 2110 posts. That's 88% of the entire forum community being provided by 14% of the members.
It gets worse if you raise the bar to, let's say, 50 posts (around 1 per week).That means 11 people have posted 1899 times between them. So the figures change to 79% of the community being provided by about 9% of the members.
Effectively, only 11 people are investing any real time and effort in to the forums. And 2 of those are Rad and Bolle, who are also in other guilds.


Next, let's look at 'who' is doing the posting, and their status within the guild. Unsuprisingly, the officers and ex-officers are generally the most active. (Above 50 Posts)
The ones with between 20 and 50 are generally the long-serving and loyal members of the guild.
And the ones with less than 20 posts are a mix of everyone.
Maybe the Officers and loyal members feel more inclined to contribute to the guild, rather than just using it for their own ends. That seem to be the case in game, with things like the guild-bank. Officers and loyal Munquis often contribute to, but rarely take from, the GuildBank.

Finally, if you raise the bar for considering a member to be 'active' to 100 - Still only an average of 2 posts per week. It means the whole forum is being maintained for the benefit of just 10 people. And those 10 names at the top of that list are generally people who also have lots to say to each other in-game, and least likely to need the forums.

And as a P.S. to all this... Tins only has 16 Posts since January?!?!
What the hell is going on there? In-Game you can barely get her to shut up.
And Myself and Knicks need to shut-up a bit more on the forums. But if we did, maybe things would be even quieter.

10 comments:

  1. Now writing my new paladin in depth guide for the 20 people :) Making players visit the forums is a long standing problem, not only for us, but for many wow guilds.

    In my really early days, before becoming a munqui, I was in a guild where they often posted some very important stuff on the forums. If there are any members who did no know, they would get a reprimande from the officers of forum use etc. I found that to be really extreme, since forums should be a supporting tool to our play time rather than a enforced code to follow.

    There are also a sub group of forum users who usually refered to as lurkers. These don't do any posts or are not vocal about things. But they are fully aware of what is going on. Unfortunately, you cannot get the numbers on them.

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  2. Woohoo top 3!

    Or maybe I should shut up too...

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  3. So are the shoutbox msgs included in the total from each person?

    And that Smy posted alot I knew.. but Knicks? Tsk tsk! Less trolling, more working there lady! :P

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  4. No, Shoutbox and forum posts are counted seperately.

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  5. It's a shame there aren't any stats to indicate number of visits.

    I admit I don't post very often on the forum. It's not because I'm a pain and don't go there. In fact, I tend to visit the forums at least a couple of times a day to keep up with things. It's just that I'm the sort of person who only speaks up when I have a point to make, but to be honest people usually end up making it for me so I've no need to post.

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  6. Grent = Forum Lurker :)

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  7. One trick to find lurkers is to use the Last Visit part of the members profile area.

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  8. I look to alot of forums verry often but on the Munqui forums there are often no interresting topics for me to replay. I guess the officers forum is verry bussy tho if I look to these numbers because mostly the officers have shitloads of posts. I never see many posts from flowers or vind (just for an excemple).

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  9. that's pretty close to Parieto's 80:20 rule though.....

    i still think the forum is valid, i guess the only way to try and make people use it more would be to be less helpful in game and direct people to forums...but then we might lose them altogether :)

    knicks

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  10. Odd, Flowersz was only an officer for a month or two, the vast majority of my posts are in the "normal" area.

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Get on with it then.