"It always seems to be the same 20 contributors" said a member I was chatting with on the phone last night ... and indeed we have an excellent regular core of people here with a good knowledge, experiences to be shared, and views aired and expanded upon.  The view of it being quite a small pool will also be naturally bolstered by members seeing much more of the people who around at the time / on the days of the week and in the boards that they themselves are particularly interested in.

I've tested the hypothesis that there are just the same twenty contributiors ...  I asked the database engine and it tells me there were over a hundred and twenty (122) in July.  There have already been fifty five (55) in the first four-and-a-bit days of August.

select id_member,count(id_member) from smf_messages where postertime > 1561942879 and postertime < 1564621279 group by id_member order by id_member;

select id_member,count(id_member) from smf_messages where postertime > 1564621279 group by id_member order by id_member;

Extending ... 162 members have been logged in during those four-and-a-bit days we have had so far in August.

select id_member from smf_members where lastlogin > 1564621279;

Looking beyond members ... using Goggle Analytics, 1130 visitors are reported in the 4 days up to midnight, of whom it classified 711 as "new", so 419 are returning ... and that's in a total of 2813 sessions.  1043 of the 1130 are identified as visiting from UK IP addresses - a good confirmation that our visitor figure is genuine British interest rather than worldwide spray (in contrast to the subset looking to register for accounts which is truly exotic)

 

I have ... rejected ... sign up requests from top level domains ... KR, CA, ID, KZ, VN, US, PH, BG, FR, BR, IT, CZ and LV ... so far this month.  Just in case anyone's interest in the list which occasionally sends me scurrying for a look up table!

 
Interesting stuff, Grahame.  Just out of interest I looked up my details and see I have been logged onto the site for over 68 continuous days now since joining over 10 years ago (obviously not all in one go!).  Where does the time go

Hopefully in that time I have been able to teach you all a little bit about the 'Dark Art' of Railway Signalling

 
Indeed you have, SandTEngineer - thank you for your time and contributions to the Coffee Shop forum!

CfN.