Well folks, I'm going to be out of town for a week or two, so I wont be online for a bit. But, before I go, I thought I'd share some Linkshell/Clan statistics some of you may be interested in...

These statistics come from several different places. 1) Observations I've made during both my play and during log reviews of my mule, 2) Site membership and readership, 3) Mailing list memberships and participation.

In the Linkshell itself, I estimate that we have around 16 members (more if you include some of those "defectors" who still keep their shells and occassionally pop in for hello's ;-) Over the last few weeks that I've had my mule, I have noticed 14 distinct people using the Linkshell. I personally know of two others that haven't been online in a while. Of these 16 members, I would say that there is a strong core of 8 players that use the shell almost daily.

These 8 core players seem to play during four distinct times during the day (these times are estimates and based upon my timezone, which is PDT). A typical day starts with Raven, Bombastic, et al playing in the early morning. Then, in the mid-morning to afternoon Drifter, Kyler, et al begin to show up. In the afternoon to evening, Val, Craigshin, and myself tend to start showing up. Then, in the late-night, Meretrix, Fearnor, etc. generally get on. This means that there is typically approximately two or three hours at night after Trix et al leave and Raven et al show up when no one is on.

Because we all play at very different times, it is my estimate that we average around 3 people in the Linkshell at any given time. Sometimes this can go as high as 6, others it can go as low as 1 (or 0 during the wee hours of the morn).

As for the website stats, we have 21 registered users on the website. Of these 21 users, only 8 distinct people have participated in the blogs, forums, etc. Visitors to the website (the stats can be found here) have averaged around 1572.5 unique hits per month, or approximately 0.44% of the total visitors to all sites hosted by samhart.net.

For mailing lists stats we have 26 registered users on the mailing list (at least two of them are duplicates). Of these 26, only 6 have actually used the list (and one of them wasn't even in our Linkshell, or even on our server). The list has averaged 1.83 messages per day, or 55 messages per month. Also, the list has attracted 283 items of spam and 41 viruses, all blocked by my fancy spam/virus blocking system (see this).

This concludes the State of the Onion....