Hi all,
I've researched the posts of the top 150 posters on Audioholics and graphed the results. What is shown below is a graph of the posts of those top 150 members over time - the left side is back in 2002, and the right side is today. The higher a line on the graph, the more posts that were made that day. The different colors show posts in various forums, as indicated in the key (click on an image to go to a page with the full result set).
I think it's sort of interesting to see the number of posts rise and fall as time goes on. Granted, it's only the posts of the top 150, but they have contributed over half of the total number of posts on the forum, so the trends shown should be pretty close to what actually happened.
I also graphed when people tend to post. What's shown below is a histogram of when posts are made (times are in EDT because that's where I am). Red pixels are posts made on weekdays, and black ones are ones made on weekends. As you can see, there's a "nighttime dip", but otherwise the posts are made pretty consistently over the course of the day.
I did all of this by using the "Advanced Search" page for each of the 150 members and searching for each person's posts, then parsing the HTML pages that were returned. I originally wrote the program (which was enhanced for here) when researching posting trends for MacRumors.com, where I'm a moderator. Anyone could have done what I did manually, but writing a program made it a lot easier (it takes about an hour to update the stats once the original searches have been done). It's important to note that none of this was done with any "privileged" information - it was all obtained (programatically) by running searches and parsing the results.
What might be more interesting is how individual members compare, both in how they've posted over time, when they post, and which forums they choose to post in.
I've compiled an overall list of when the top 150 post during the day
here. Remember, black posts are weekend ones, and the others are weekday ones.
The list of when they've posted since the dawn of the forums is
here. The bars show which days they posted, and the colors indicate the forums in which they posted.
The list of graphs showing how the posts accumulated for each member is
here. The graph show growth over time as they accumulated posts, and the colors indicate the forums in which they posted.
The graphs are all the same height, regardless of the post totals (so it might be misleading if one member has 10,000 posts and another has 750). This was done to make it easier to compare graphs and to reduce the total height of the page.
Finally, if you are one of the top 150, or would like to see the detailed information on any of those top 150 members, it's all accessible from the
main page. Just click on the avatar or name of the poster to see their information.
There are other breakdowns - the past year, the past half-year, the past month, the past week. Feel free to look around. I'd be happy to add other members eventually. One minor note: it would seem that some of the posts aren't found by the Advanced Search, and so the post totals might be slightly different than what is listed on the Member page. The differences are trivial, though.
Please note that, as of right now, I'm unable to get or send PMs.