Post Count Research

[Opine]

A Ladies’ Home Journal article in June 1918 said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink

[Bosola]

Traditionally, reds and pinks - the colour of blood - were signs of virility. Blue was seen as girlish, possibly because in Christian tradition (especially Catholic), blue is trademark of the Virgin Mary.

Likewise, it was always traditional for children to wear skirts, regardless of gender. It wasn't until a boy hit puberty (though 'boy' only really means servant - all children used to be called 'gerls') that he'd be 'breeched', e.g. given trousers to wear.

[Opine]

That's really interesting! I had no idea.

[obesebear]

In keeping with the fun fact theme of this thread, we recently had to say goodbye to ~1410 of our members who have never posted a single thing and also haven't been active within the last 365 days.

Another fun fact, is that even though they had to leave, we still have ~2670 members who have been here within at least a year who haven't posted anything.   

We will soon be saying goodbye to those with only 2 or 1 post, who will be given that same 1 year time frame.  For now 3+ posts will be considered contributing no matter the last active date, because good God who has the time to go through EVERY SINGLE MEMBER.

I will keep everyone updated on how many members we lose

[The Seer of Shadows]

It's probably a good thing to be saying goodbye to all of them, since they blow the 'member count' of the forums totally out of proportion.  Not that it's a big deal or anything.  Still, I'd assume that if they really wanted to retain membership here, they'd come and visit at least once a year and perhaps even occasionally... you know... post stuff.

[Opine]

I don't know about "posting stuff", but I agree with the visiting.
I rarely posted when I first joined. So I can see other people joining, but just lurking.
But why join, and then never visit? Unless you visit, but don't bother to sign in because you aren't going to post anyways...

But oh well, if that's the case they can PM an admin to save their account, or something.

[Bosola]

An important point: we suspect our massive count of members is what's causing the server load, and the slow database requests. We're not just doing this for convenience, but to keep the site usable for the people who do visit.

[obesebear]

Unfortunately any kind of gain from removing members will probably be negligible :/  But at least it's something.  We're also looking into deleting a lot of older posts that are either duplicates and answered somewhere else, or just plain taking up space.

Hopefully in doing all of this we will quit running into the server load errors that seem to be plaguing us recently.