Is there an easier way to count the posters in Democratic Primaries than this? [View all]

[LAS14]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by Yonnie3 (a host of the Democratic Primaries forum).

Last edited Sat Mar 16, 2019, 05:48 PM - Edit history (4)

I figured I could type names of posters into a spreadsheet. As the project went on I would recognize names that I'd already entered and could skip them. At the end I could sort and delete duplicates. Time consuming, yes. I could do it over time. Does anyone have a better approach?

Edit after some replies: I'm NOT interested in gathering names. I'm only interested in the total count of participants in the Democratic Primaries forum. It's a figure MANY people have expressed an interest in knowing, but the replies here suggest the people suspect me of nefarious motives. Why not assume the best instead of the worst????

tia
las

STATUS REPORT 1: I hit 100 unique participants after counting in 4 high participation posts. I'll keep doing this over time until I begin to get mostly duplicates. Not scientific by a long shot, but it should tell us whether we're dealing with 100 or 1000.

STATUS REPORT 2: It took me 20 minutes to find 100 more unique participants. I'm going to do some errands now.

STATUS REPORT 3: I changed tactics and went through the names of the OPs for the seventeen available pages (1 month). The new names dropped off sharply at about page 6. The total is now 406. Next I'll go look at the most active post on each page to get a sample of people who reply but don't generate OPs.

STATUS REPORT 4: My last pass was to look at 2 or 3 active posts on each page. I tried to find threads that dealt with different topics. I stopped at page 10 because I was finding so few new names. Final report is that there are, for sure, 500 unique posters in this forum, and probably not a whole lot more.