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I admin a spanish spoken forum and I've worked with online commnities for a few years, and I'm also a member here.
My thoughts:
What Trevor suggests is a metric of active users. Such a metric is usually a good indicator of the health of an online community. Let's say if a community only has 3 or 4 members that post it is more a blog than a community with all the advantages and disadvantages of that.
Furthermore the number of active members in a community not always rises as the user base grows.
Of course I'm with Mike in the concept of members being registered members wether they post or not is irrelevant.
But Trevor's metric does have a value, it's something that online communities have to watch, if your "active" user base shrinks or doesn't grow in quite a time then something is probably happening that deserves some attention.
There's something in old online communities that I call the "club effect", when a community has several years there's a group of very active members usually around 10-50 that create most of the posts and that comment on each other's posts. These set of members usually don't post or interact with new members joining the community, that leads to new members getting very few comments or answers and eventually they fade.
There are several things that an online community can do about the club effect in case that's something that matters.
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