Total Residents / Members

Been watching the total Residents number on the SL splash page. It has not changed from 370,977 for several days. I have been traveling and busy in RL - did I miss an announcement that the number is not updating? I have always seen that number change daily....

OR, are numbers declining and LL is not updating? (*Trolls for conspiracy theorists)....

OR, existing members got bored with creating thousands of free alt's / new accounts.

It was changing by 1500 daily until it stopped on 8/4/06.

Personally, I think the update process is buggered... and with everything else that's been happening the last couple of weeks, it's low on the list of things to fix.

I agree, Tiger. The numbers are not 'real' - but they are the only indicator of membership over time we have.

Just a curiousity, and found it interesting that it stopped updating.

The total Members on the splash page have updated. Just as I suspicioned, the number has dropped from 370,997 to 312,986. Down 58,011 or 15.6% from last week.

Can't recall a decline in membership of that significance over the past 2 years.

Interesting.

Uh-Oh... The Party is Over.. Declining Population and a Rising Currency Float...
Or could LL be taking my advice and actually cancelling old and unsed accounts?

LL should have a policy that all free accounts will be cancelled if inactive for 90 days.
That will help to better shore up the "true" population.

If they *do* have a policy that free accounts are cancelled after 60 days of inactivity, that would explain the drop in population numbers. 60 days ago was just after June 6th -- the day they removed any level of accountability and the start of AltFest 2006.

Maybe it reflects the removal of teens who have posted about being underage on the forums. We've had a lot of those lately.

I was wondering how many unused accounts there are. I would imagine that a large percentage of people who register free lose interest or find they don't have the time needed to fully immerse themselves in SL. Deleting dormant accounts would make sense.

Albion

Unless it has changed, I have read that the reported number does not include dormant accounts. Although the time frame used to determine active (i.e. past 90 days, 2 months, ...) was never made clear to me.

The number is back up to 392,091.

And once more RBD is proven wrong by the facts...

You know... you'd not look so damn foolish if you weren't so quick to crow about things.

Interesting that following my post regarding the precipitous decline in reported membership that the membership number SKYROCKETS from 312, 986 to 392,091 in one day. An increase of 79,105, or 25.3% in one day.

LOL.... either one of three things apply here - all disturbing.

1. Linden Lab does not really know what the true membership numbers are. Which could be of interest to the investors.

2. The systems interface is so screwed that it causes he wild swings in membership numbers.

3. The numbers are intentionally 'massaged' to maximize reported membership. Again, could be of interest to the investors.

All very interesting.

Bottom line, this is my last post regarding membership numbers. They are obviously borked and not worth the pixels with which they are displayed.

The old axiom may still hold true.... "Figures can lie and liars can figure".

Hehe, we'll miss RBD when the forums are shut down (first forum is Land and Economy).

Or maybe not. All bad things have a good side

The Linden Labs Population Generator crashed today and reverted back to an old cache from weeks ago. Once the mistake was learned, LL rebooted the population generator and everything is back to normal.. A glitch in the matrix.. lol

I took the Red Pill, I know.

I vote for (1) and (3). The problem is that with free, unvalidated registrations, it becomes a problem of statistics to determine who truly "uses" SL.

If I pay subscription fees, I'm clearly a user. If I pay nothing, yet log in once a week, I'm a user. However, what if I pay nothing and haven't logged in for a month? Or two months? How long does a user need to be idle (no payments, no logins) before they are considered "not a user" and expunged from the database?

If I had access to LL's login statistics, I could answer that question. However, I don't and they don't seem forthcoming. I asked in the SL Answers forum whether we would *ever* be getting "users logged in over the past X days", where X is 7, 14, 30, info added to the economic statistics page. Apparently they're keeping it proprietary. Probably so guys like me can't accurately calculate their churn.

It updates fine for me. Press "refresh"

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/08/11/what-is-that-number-anyway/ has more information on this issue.

Sorry, Sally, that's about as clear as mud..

=B-)