"Active Members" Statistic

[Xarnax42]

I've always been curious, how is the number of "Active Members" determined?

More importantly, why has that number been dropping? I haven't made any notes or anything, but I peek at that corner of the page almost daily. I remember a few years ago it was around 1300, and it has slowly and steadily declined and is now well under half that amount.

I imagine Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all the OCR interaction a lot of people need. Still, if there's more to it than that, it seems like a discussion worth having.

[kitty]

I believe an "active member" is tallied when an account on the forum logs in once within the last 30 days. If you hover over that area, a tool tip pops up that says "within the last 30 days."

It's dropped about 100 users in the last 2-4 weeks.

[djpretzel]

I imagine Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all the OCR interaction a lot of people need. Still, if there's more to it than that, it seems like a discussion worth having.

Pretty sure that's all there is to it. Probably also a factor of our core audience growing older, having more responsibilities that pull them away, etc.

It's based on recent logins, yes.

There's little doubt in my mind that many are also becoming more passive consumers of media, where clicking a like button is the most one can expect re:interaction.

With our planned forum migration, hopefully we can track/incentivize engagement without a negative effect on quality, and also our plans to greatly expand the workshop area - which revolves around forum accounts - should help increase activity.