I would suggest that your figures (and I don’t dispute them) are not particularly relevant as you have interpreted them. 48K members tells us nothing of the number actually reading the site. 100 regular “posters” – not untypical of many forums (or fora, according to taste). All we can conclude is that the number of readers is somewhere between the two figures, and that assumes that all casual readers are registered. Not sure if this is true.

Neither do I think that “only 100” regular posters is a real measure of anything. I’m trying to be objective here and imply no criticism of anyone, but it seems to be that in any large group there will be a small number that talk a lot and a lot that sit back and listen. Look at the club membership that turn up to club meetings (assuming that enough do to give a statistically significant result!) and you will probably see the same thing. I suspect that the reluctance to contribute is even stronger online than in real life because it’s only too easy to respond to a post in a way that sounds critical without that being the intention and it is difficult for the original poster to continue posting it they feel, however wrongly, that they are being attacked. Or just ignored. This is purely anecdotal but my impression is that this site, like many others, has a relatively small number of posters who generate active responses and discussion and quite a few who have posted a few times and not again. It takes quite a lot to make some people stick their head over the parapet if they feel that someone will take pot-shots at them if they do!

Personally, I come to this forum to mainly learn and to a lesser extent be entertained. In my local club I talk a lot about CNC, for example, because I am one of the most experienced CNC users and CNC builders in that community. But in this forum I tend to keep my mouth shut because there are already active contributors on such topics. What do I have to add here? I’m sure that there are plenty like me.

As I said, I am not criticising any individuals here because without those expert and regular posters, I would not be achieving my aim to learn. But contribute, sometimes in the face of a “my way or the wrong way” response? That’s another matter!

Does 48k inactive users make any difference to the speed if they are not trying to download pages? It has always seemed odd to me that servers will sit on a page request for seconds for no apparent reason. It can also be down to software writers making one action dependent on getting a response from a server and just sitting around waiting. Think about why your mega fast computer takes minutes to boot up if it has the capacity to read war and peace ten times a second.

Yeah, but no, but, when the mag was pre internet you wouldn’t have based the success or failure on the numbers contributing on the letters page. It still seems to be the way today – more readers than writers.

If you want an example of slow death try CentecMillingMachines@groups.io    This had a quite healthy posting rate and loads of documents and photos when on Yahoo groups, but all it needed was a change to a disinterested owner (wrong word) who couldn’t be bothered to moderate and then the switch to IO and you can see what’s left traffic wise.

Our current Centec poster had only 2 responses.

Advertisers aren’t very interested in number of members.  The stats they look at are page views and retention times.

There is an understanding that the website plays a role in keeping a hobby that is in real danger of fragmentation (so many different subsets of creative hobbies these days) to have a unified identity. Model engineering and the magazines have always been symbiotic in the UK.

With the loss of exhibitions the forum provides a route for those who are not club members to engage in a model engineering community.

Another fallacy, described and popularised by Daniel Kahneman, is the ‘planning fallacy’. I think his use of the word ‘fallacy’ is misleading, because what he describes is really a delusion or cognitive bias, not a logical fallacy. But, be that as it may, it’s now become fairly well known. It’s all around us: it’s about the inside view of a project or problem being over-optimistic. (‘Inside view’ being the view from within the project group, etc.). The difficulty and the projected time it would take, and its expense are underestimated. The outside view can provide abundant, objective information about comparable projects, which should temper the optimism of the inside view, but – assuming it is even sought – such information is ignored or dismissed, and the possibility of unpredicted disruptions is not allowed for: “It can’t possibly take more than a couple of weeks”, “What could possibly go wrong?”, etc.. Thus we get the high-profile budget blow-outs, and massive delays. But it’s also why our little workshop projects take forever – and probably why we should be wary of accepting “Can you just…” jobs.