Who reads FR? [FReepathon thread 9.6]

Conservapedia-An Illustrated Guide ^ | Jan 18, 2011

[bezelbub]

At www.freerepublic.com, we find the question Who reads FR? to be answered in the following way:

Over 300,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic since inception in 1996 and our forum is read daily by over one hundred thousand freedom loving citizens and patriots from all around the country, and all around the world. We're currently delivering over thirty million pageviews per month to over one million visitors.

This number of 300,000 users is sometimes quoted (i.e., "On one conservative Web site, Freerepublic.com, some of the site's 300,000 registered users have recently used discussion threads to encourage votes for Bristol." - www.people.com), and adorns the front page of freerepublic since Dec 2008 (waybackmachine.com).
But it was wrong then - and it is still wrong now.

So, why aren't there 300,000 freepers?

When registering for posting privileges, any user gets an identification number. The user normally doesn't see this ID, it is only used for internal purposes. Jim Robinson got the number 1, the number 100,000 is taken by The 100,000th FReeper! Unfortunately, these consecutive numbers seem to have been assigned at the beginning of the registration process, not after a successful creation of an account. So each failed try to register increased the used ids, but not the number of accounts. Both numbers diverged pretty fast, but the bug wasn't mended until Feb 2010, when the new mile-stone of 350,000 attempted registrations arrived. By then, the two numbers differed by roughly 100,000. In fact, when freerepublic announced to have 300,000 registered users for the first time ind Dec 2008, the number really was closer to 230,000 - and today, it is less than 270,000.

And what has been done about it?

The way the powers-to-be have chosen to get the numbers right is obvious: they wait for the reality to fit the stated fact. The number of created accounts wasn't updated for two years, and probably won't be changed for another two years, until the number of registered freepers meets the announcement on the front page.

Just for the record: I think that the number of pageviews and visitors are correct. And I doubt that the makers of the site willingly inflated the numbers of created accounts. It seems to be just an honest mistake, and an easy one to make. But when they found the bug, wouldn't it have been the right thing to change the number, as they knew that it was false?

[John W]

Damn theres a lot of bitching around here lately.

[Lucky9teen]

Oh good grief...

Are they sure they were logged in?

[stuartcr]

Those that want to and have the luxury of a lot of time on their hands to be on the internet.

[don-o]

You got us now.

[HushTX]

Is that bitching? It’s hard to tell. There’s so much bitching going on that I don’t always recognize it anymore. This struck me as a bunch of number crunching for no obvious purpose.

[ClearCase_guy]

This strikes me as equivalent to George W Bush and the yellowcake. Based on the best information available at the time, a statement was made. Now it seems to be perceived as either a lie or a cover-up. Sheesh!

[Rightly Biased]

Keep complaining and Jim may make it 299,999 registered users.

Just sayin.

[GreenAccord]

Is this going to be one of those 1,000+ post threads?

[Keith in Iowa]

Hey, bezel bub: The least you could have done while posting this is ping Jim to it.

[muawiyah]

Nobody knows what the "right thing" is regarding estimations of anything. Is it too high? Is it too low? Is it about right?

Back in the days when Sputnik was still new someone ran a poll on what folks thought about the heights of the orbits of the satellites.

Yes, there were opinions ~ virtually 100% of those questioned by the pollsters had one.

So what!

FR continues to provide a hot and cold combination focus/encounter group environment ~

[mnehring]

Both numbers diverged pretty fast, but the bug wasn't mended until Feb 2010, when the new mile-stone of 350,000 attempted registrations arrived. By then, the two numbers differed by roughly 100,000.

This is pretty much the basis for their argument but they don't provide any evidence thta this is accurate. It seems to be a major stretch that almost 1/3rd of sign-ups required multiple attempts to sign up. With the simplicity of FRs registration process, even a 10% error rate in sign ups would seem to be a stretch.

[Zuben Elgenubi]

Help me please. The chart indicates 190,000 working accounts in 1998 but 'The 100,000th Freeper' registers on Feb 23, 2003.

Let's call in CSI-FResno.

[reagan_fanatic]

Somebody didn’t get a smiley face on their pancakes this morning, did they?

[nutmeg]

ping

[don-o]

btw

Yer blog is pretty sad.

Yes. I looked.

[Allegra]

All those missing FReepers will come back when all our base are returned to us.

[Kartographer]

Bush’s Fault!

[Nervous Tick]

The headline says WHO reads FR? But the verbage doesn’t address thequestion of WHO, in any sense whatsoever — it only pokes around the edges of HOW MANY may read FR. Kinda worthless news if you ask me.

[Jim Robinson]

Who’s counting? Who cares. We’ve got a lot of people posting here and even more reading.