But what about...butterflies?! And ladybirds?! Just saw the summer's first butterfly this morning, it was so nice!
Also, a month and a half! Wow! Feels like it's been here for years! O__O
Butterflies are nice until you get up close. Those pretty wings belie their true natures.
Ladybirds (ladybugs over here <coccinellidae, for you biologists>) are nasty. I used to be okay with them, until a swarm of them got into our dirty laundry, one day. That was not a fun occasion.
Yes, our little community is quite a bustling place now. And troll/spam-free since those first few "Gucci bag" attempts, which is rare.
But if you have any experience with how other online communities grow, do you know if this one has a typical growth rate? I noticed that early on, we were adding dozens of new members a day, and now we're lucky to get 2.
Also, we have about 40 members who haven't made any posts at all, and another 50-odd who've only done one. (In other words, very much a "long tail" of contributors.) Is that normal?
I read somewhere that for blog/Web pages (e.g. the Disqus threads to the main comic), you can assume for every 1 comment, there are between 10 and 20 other readers. If so, Minna's comic readership is quite healthy. I recognize a lot of Disqus posters, but many new names show up every day -- and for many of them, SSSS is the first/only Disqus post they've made. (I'm paying such close attention to community dynamics because I'm applying for jobs in the tech-marketing field, and I want to sound knowledgeable about social media. Unlike Sigrun, I can expect to be grilled about my experience *before* I get the job.)
I'm quite happy with how well the bot fix worked out.
Warning, wall of text inbound. Keep your TL;DR at the ready.That's all very normal, from what I've experienced. Those first couple of weeks on here had so many new members because I made sure to make lots of announcements in the comments, once I realized I was going to make it (if you look back at those pages where I got started, you'll see quite a bit of publicizing going on). So lots of people knew about it, but the activity was slow enough (on comic related topics, at least and, from what I've seen we actually had a relatively
fast start) in that time that a lot of people lost interest or forgot (that slow start, almost ironically, was what caused topics to move that slowly in the first place and make people forget, slowing it more...). It's why I made the "super-newbie" group. I wanted to be able to keep track of the non-posters efficiently.
As far as the current growth rate goes, we're still above average. The longest established forum I was a part of was lucky to get 2 new members in a month. That was the now-defunct SuckerPunch forums (RIP... :'(). Of course, you have to account for the publicity of the site. They made some fantastic games, but they had no significant advertising for a long time, so not many people knew about them. This is going to be a long paragraph... Once they
did get some advertising money (for their most recent game), and started an ad campaign, I showed up and stuck around, along with one other frequent user. Around the launch of the game, new members started showing up in droves, between 3 and 10 a day, for a couple of weeks, but most of them only made between 1 and 40 posts. Out of all of them, I can only think of one who became a regular user. He was delightful. In the 5 or 6 years it was around, the SP forum got several thousand members, but only a few hundred of them used it for more than a few weeks at a time. That place shut down because the studio was bought by Sony, so PlayStation assimilated the site into the PS forum.
That place has... tens of thousands of users, and gets lots of new ones every hour (I hesitate to say hundreds of thousands, because orders of magnitude quickly escalate into hyperbole
).
Considering the number of donators in both of Minna's indiegogo campaigns, I'd say we're still gaining members at an unprecedented rate, though it fits within the 10-20 rule you stated. This is, after all, a rather obscure forum for one of the more well known members of an
extremely obscure pastime. Webcomics aren't the most popular kind of media, and there's a definite oversaturation of them right now. Just check TWC. A lot of comics don't even use that site at all, but they still have
a lot registered in their database. All in all, I'd say we're doing quite well here.
Wall of text: passed. Proceed with normal foruming.Also, concerning the SuckerPunch forums (from the wall of text you skippers): That place was very different from here, lots of sarcasm and stupidity, but everyone was just playing, and not very serious. At the same time, we had a "Religion and Politics" thread, and we were mature enough to avoid getting the thread get nuked by the mods. The community was tight, and had some very cool members. It closed down the day before I came back to college, two weeks before I started this, and nobody made the move over to the PS forums. I wasn't expecting it to hit me quite so hard, but it actually made me pretty sad to see that place go. Some of us still keep in contact, but we're never going to get any new members again; that community's days are numbered. I brought some pieces of that place to here when I made the forum. The Art Museum, the setup for the GDB we're using now that caught on so well, and the music thread, are a few of the things I knew I would want here, that I found on there.
