Posting rates (was Too much email)

[dfrankiswork at netscape.net]

Katsmall unwisely moaned:

>Too much email ... can't read that fast ... can't say complete sentences 
... mind gonna break ... AHHHH!
HPforGrownUps (301 unread mail messages). Yikes.

For your interest I have been to the home pages of the 5 'major' HPFGU lists (main, Announcements, OT, Movie and Convention), cut and pasted the monthly posting rates into Excel, drawn a graph, put it in a Word file and uploaded it to the files area here.

I have plotted the number of posts for all complete months since becoming a Yahoo Group (September 2000 - November 2002), for all these lists put together, and for the main list alone.  The two are the same for the first few months because at that time the main list was the only list.

I think the peaks are (oldies correct me if I'm wrong):

Jan 2001: HPFGU was mentioned on salon.com, causing an influx of new members.
Mar-April 01: why Abanes is now a forbidden topic, as well as the initial explosion of OT.
Nov 01: the first movie - notice that the main list hardly changed at all at this time.  Interestingly, the peak is much less pronounced this time around, though there does appear to have been a steady increase in activity in the past few months.

Question: has there in fact, once you take out the special factors, been an underlying decline in posting, especially bearing in mind the vastly increased membership over the same period?

One model could be that each newbie posts for a while, and then more or less ceases.  The period and rate would vary from person to person, but the overall effect would be that to sustain the posting rate requires a continued influx of new members, rather than a continuing high membership.

David

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