Stephen said:

About 500-800 people visit SV daily, depending on the day of the week. (Technically, we get 500-800 visits daily). This peaked at CollarGate at around 2000. …

Are those unique IP addresses?

/curious (and ok if noyb is the response)…

DD

I don't know what kind of hosting you guys have, but if you have CPanel or something similar you probably have a statistics program that will give you the number of unique visitors.  The one I have is AWStats, which does a good job.

Again this is just my own personal experience, but early in the life of a forum you want any and all posters you can get.  We've all seen boards which get maybe one or two posts a week, usually someone asking a question which never gets answered.  They're just sad places.  Boards seem to have a sort of critical mass which is necessary for survival.  If you can get fifty different people to take a look each and every day then the board will probably succeed.  Once the board is thriving, then you can start culling the weak and undesirable, but until then anything is better than nothing.  Sign up multiple accounts and have conversations with yourself if that's what it takes.  If there aren't new posts every day, then readers aren't going to check out the boards every day, and without readers there are no posters.  It's a viscious cycle which you have to break.

A tried and true way of leeching members from a successful board is by adopting a martryr.  Forum goers love martyrs.  You can usually find one if you don't feel like making one.  Maybe the mods are picking on a well-liked member of a large forum.  If you can get them to start posting on your forum you're most of the way there already.  People ask whatever happened to Martyr, and find out that they're at Skepticalviewer now.  You get a rep as that "other" board.  If you're really lucky the mods of big board will try to put an embargo on you.  Then you've got the Adam and Eve effect working in your favor.  Your board is now this forbidden fruit which everyone wants to check out.  A lot of mods are dumb enough to try this, too.  They'll say something bad about your board, or start deleting sig links, or whatever.  Before you know it there are 120 people checking out your site at the same time.  Give em a good show and some will come back.  Of course if you're really good, you can do things to make all this play out the way you want.  Use your imagination.

CrowTRobot, I couldn't agree with you more. Like you, I was drawn to this message board and appreciate the intelligent and divergent opinions of the posters.

I'm probably more skeptical than the next guy (I don't even believe in UFOs or aliens) but I didn't use to be that way. I used to believe in a lot of things until I saw a psychic investigation program in the late seventies or early eighties with James Randi, where he exposed a charlatan who claimed to have special powers. This program opened my eyes to critical thinking and literally changed my life.

Over the years I have become more of a hard-core skeptic. But thanks to my wife, I try to keep an open mind about all things. She too is a skeptic, but she pointed out that there is such a thing as being TOO skeptical. She dislikes James Randi for the very reason I love him. I remain on the skeptical side but I try to allow that there may be things even science and reason can't explain.

Although I have never really had any paranormal experiences, I know too many, credible, people who have. I do believe that there are things that cannot be explained, deja vu being one of them, but I also believe that not everything HAS to have an explanation. We will never truly know how the humin brain works so how can we expect to understand or explain the mysteries of the universe?