Shrinking Users?

Yesterday at 1:00am the resident count was 256,336 tonight at 12:45am it's 245,692. That's a shrinkage of about 11,000 residents. Anyone know what's going on?

http://planet0.planet-zero.org/~chromal/slpop/

Curious.

Maybe that's just AC and her alts

Very kewl stats page - have been keeping my own population status but this is much more complete

Well, it could get rather complicated when lib secondlife starts logging bots.

Residents: 243,671
Yesterday this number was 256,336. I'll be gone today so could sombody find and ask a Linden what happened to almost 13,000 new residents?

Chris Linden
Program Manager

Great question!

Internally, we count our total number of residents in a couple of different ways, all for valid reasons. A couple of these different methods are: accounts in good standing, active last 30 days, active last 60 days, etc…

Even accounts in good standing can be counted a few different ways because we have numerous status' accounts can be in, some of which can be confusing as to whether they are "in good standing".

Anyway, to make a long story short, we've decided to tweak what we felt was a better representation of what our current resident count is.

So no, 10,000 residents weren't just eliminated. We now feel they were being improperly counted and adjusted the counter as such. As always, we strive to be as open and honest about our resident count as possible.

Chris

If they would just wipe dormant accounts that haven't been logged in for, say, 6 months, we'd get a better representation and have a population of about 80,000 (most of whom would be alts created in the last week).

Why is wiping dormant unpaid accounts such a problem? If someone hasn't logged in for 6 months, they should hardly miss being here should they?

Lewis

Because of people like me who have no computer and would be really REALLY sad if Dhalia was wiped before i can get another. *sniffle* poor Dhalia!

That makes me wonder if logging into the forums counts as account activity for the purposes of purging accounts...

Are we done yet? The number jumped today from 245,692 to 257,393. There was another answer to this same question.


Quote:
Chris Linden: Internally, we count our total number of residents in a couple of different ways, all for valid reasons. A couple of these different methods are: accounts in good standing, active last 30 days, active last 60 days, etc…

Even accounts in good standing can be counted a few different ways because we have numerous status' accounts can be in, some of which can be confusing as to whether they are "in good standing".

Anyway, to make a long story short, we've decided to tweak what we felt was a better representation of what our current resident count is.

So no, 10,000 residents weren't just eliminated. We now feel they were being improperly counted and adjusted the counter as such. As always, we strive to be as open and honest about our resident count as possible.

Chris


I appreciate your honesty and openness. I'm curious as to why there was no public announcement of the change. It's not a big hairy deal; I'm just curious.

I'm also curious about the criteria or status indicators used to determine whether an individual is in good standing. It sounds strange that Linden Lab staff are confused about whether an account is in good standing. If you can tell us, what are the criteria?

Lastly, I'm a bit unclear on what exactly was changed. Have the criteria used for determining resident status changed? Or has the "sampling" used to produce the "resident number" changed?

Thanks


Robin Linden
Linden Lifer

Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 2,619

We want to make sure that the numbers we're showing as Second Life membership are meaningful -- that is representative of actual involvement in Second Life. We're using a formula that should help to factor out accounts that aren't active. The formula went into effect today and may have somewhat over-compensated.

In any event, a good number to watch to get a sense for actual Second Life activity is the past 60 day unique log-in number on the Economic Stats page. This number is currently just over 127,000.

That's a great idea - neatly sidesteps the issue of having an SL-able computer in cases where people are temporarily computerless or in lengthy transition. Stop at a library and log into forums or the sl website and be good to go. Maybe it does work this way...

that would be nice! I wonder if there is a way to find this out. Any Lindens willing to jump in here? or someone in the know?

Im guessing logging into the forums doesnt count for your stipend

Currently, use of the the forums is not a factor in determining activity level.

thanks for jumping in Chris! Much appreciated! Now maybe you can help me out with my dead graphics card...

They never said anything about wiping. Just counting.

As for wiping a dormant account? Some people might want to return. If it costs them little to hold on to the data, and it probably does, they might as well hold it.

Costs LL very little to hold on to the data, such a small price to pay for allowing a long missing resident to come back and find his avatar still there.

What they did was just a simple matter of counting differently.

My guess would be we're seeing the beginnings of my predictions showing true. New ppl can't buy any of the nice stuff older ones have. There is no paying work and legitimate gaming in SL is near non-existent. Also you can't just start making things and selling them for L's since rental of store space or land purchasing, plus uploading textures, and geting decent low lag vendor sytems all cost several thousand L's start up costs. So...end result, they see that all they can do for fun is sit around the WA and watch griefers pick of people like a crap shoot and liasons doing nothing to curb this. Ergo, SL is not fun for enw folks anymore. LL will ultimately lose a lot of new players and with them, content creators who no longer have a market for thier goods in SL. I said it before and I will say it again, you cannot take away the ONLY income someone had without replacing it, or they head for greener pastures. Right now the only thing keeping SL green is the manure than Jamie and RBD keep shovelin'. If Linden wanted to remove stipends they should FIRST and FOREMOST have required any employers in SL pay a minimum hourly wage or commission. What they did is instead like all our RL utilities dbling thier rates and all work in RL going to non payment for labor. The simple fact is there are lots of jobs in SL. Creating new ones is not the issue. Geting employers to pay anything however is.

I'm currently looking for a texture artist (must be proficient in gimp or photoshop), and an animator. Finding reliable employees that actually follow through on assigned work is extremely difficult.

And generally I only get 2 or 3 replies to most of my job postings.

The problem isn't a lack of jobs, it's that a lot of people don't want to work. And that's fine. But either you work or you buy some Lindens on Lindex. If you aren't willing to work and you aren't willing to buy Lindens, then don't whine about not being able to buy things.

As a newbie, I really never paid much attention to getting that 50L a week anyways. There was always money trees to pick or winning money at contests to get started. When I bought my first skin, I needed 20 dollars and there was no way saving that 50L a week would've mattered much anyways. I hope I'm wrong with the newbies not liking SL now that they won't get that 50L a week. It has really slowed down the past few days for me, but I'm hoping that was just due to the flex craze a few weeks ago. At least it just averages out to a good few weeks.

Lewis,

that's rather poor math on your side if you ask me. Nearly 130.000 unique residents logged in the last 60 days. As 60 days are 2 months how can you ever have less than 130.000 in the last 6 months?

Shrinking users? Users are getting smaller?

Did you maybe mean "shrinking number of users"?

Musuko.

Do you have anything better to do than troll this forum correcting people who's first language is not english on their grammar?

This is the second post in two threads i've seen where you've done nothing but pick at people's spelling or grammar.

"Do you have anything better to do than troll this forum correcting people who's first language is not english on their grammar?"

Do you have anything better to do than complain about people who troll this forum correcting people, whose first language is not English, on their grammar?

"This is the second post in two threads i've seen where you've done nothing but pick at people's spelling or grammar."

Two posts out of 341? 0.6% of my posts. Boy, what a grammar-obsessed loser I am.

By the way Milly, 11% of your posts are complaining about people trolling about grammar. ^_^

Musuko.