Average Age of an AARoads Forum user.

[hotdogPi]

They'll skew high because they posted at an earlier age than their current age.

[skluth]

Fred Defender is listed as 107 now and made his last post in 2016. That would put him as 101 when he (likely) died.

https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=12936

There's no way I believe that age even for a second. His first post was in 2014; that would mean he started posting at 99 years old.

Honestly, NE2 being 14 years old (even though I know he's not) is more believable than this.

And indeed, here's some evidence as to his approximate age, showing that his posted age is off by at least 30 years.

Right you are. I graduated in 1974 and turned 66 this summer, so I was one of the 25% or so of my class who couldn't drink legally upon graduation (drinking age in Wisconsin being 18 back then). Since he said Summer 1978 was right after graduation, that would make Fred 3-4 years younger than me or about 62-63.

[J N Winkler]

They'll skew high because they posted at an earlier age than their current age.

How would that make a difference?  Displayed age is updated and does not stay static.  None of these calculations depend on individuals' ages at the time of posting--the groupings are based on cumulative post count.

Edit:  Having thought about it some more, I think I understand the hypothesis you are making:  their age continues to update (leading to upward skew) while they remain inactive.  FWIW, I suspect that for any definition of this population (e.g., members with PDAs but no posts in last six months, members with PDAs but no posts in last 12 months, etc.), the average age will be similar (late 30s/early 40s) to those already calculated for other population subsets.  One reason is that the forum is still young (just 13 years) and thus has not had enough time to accumulate a lengthy "tail" of members who are inactive because they are dead.  (MNHighwayMan and Randy Hersh come to mind; Sparker has not been active in quite a while.)  Moreover, the inactive-user population is constantly being refreshed with new members, often quite younger than the PDA average, who either never post or essentially quit the forum after just a few posts.

[Scott5114]

I don't think Randy Hersh ever posted to this forum, for what it's worth.

But there is no way to know whether a forum member not well known to the community has died or merely lost interest in the forum, regardless of their age. At about the midway point of the pandemic, whenever I saw users who had their last login dated 2020, I found myself briefly wondering as to whether they had perhaps been stricken down by the virus, or if their inactive state was due to other circumstances.

[US71]

I don't think Randy Hersh ever posted to this forum, for what it's worth.

I want to say he did a couple times in the old days, but I have no conclusive proof.

[Rothman]

I don't think Randy Hersh ever posted to this forum, for what it's worth.

I want to say he did a couple times in the old days, but I have no conclusive proof.

Ditto.

[J N Winkler]

I don't think Randy Hersh ever posted to this forum, for what it's worth.

I want to say he did a couple times in the old days, but I have no conclusive proof.

Ditto.

He has (had) 56 posts under username sammack.

But there is no way to know whether a forum member not well known to the community has died or merely lost interest in the forum, regardless of their age. At about the midway point of the pandemic, whenever I saw users who had their last login dated 2020, I found myself briefly wondering as to whether they had perhaps been stricken down by the virus, or if their inactive state was due to other circumstances.

About 1% of the US population dies every year.  However, I think we have fewer accounts inactive as a result of death than that number would imply, because we undersample the extreme ends of the age pyramid, though for different reasons.  Newborns aren't signing up for this forum (the floor is effectively around age 10 because of not just literacy but also developmental readiness for adult conversation), and neither are the very aged (Web forums are only 20 years old and I suspect members in their 80s, if we have any, picked up the necessary tech familiarity in their 60s).

However, we are none of us getting any younger, and a few of us will fail to achieve full life expectancy for a variety of reasons, cancer being a big one.

As for people going silent during the time of covid, I see that as having many distinct proximate causes.  It was psychologically traumatic even for people who didn't catch it and, it turned out (but was not necessarily known at the time), had reasonably good insulation from the risk of catching it.  I can see us having members who gave up on the forum because of long covid, or because someone close to them caught it and didn't survive and the experience prompted them to reconsider their ties to this forum.

[webny99]

To throw yet another wrench in the works, it's interesting that around 75% of members with 10,000 posts (granted, very small sample size) display their age, while less than 20% do so when expanded to include all forum members. My guess is that publicly displaying your age and other personal information is at least loosely correlated to ones' commitment level to the forum, since doing so can help build credibility.

One one hand, this means users displaying their age is probably a relatively good proxy for "active" members, since you'd expect the share to go down for less active users. On the other hand, it's not really fair to include the age of anyone with 0 posts in the analysis (and at a quick glance, that would exclude about 2100 of 4349 members, nearly half).

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

[Scott5114]

To throw yet another wrench in the works, it's interesting that around 75% of members with 10,000 posts (granted, very small sample size) display their age, while less than 20% do so when expanded to include all forum members. My guess is that publicly displaying your age and other personal information is at least loosely correlated to ones' commitment level to the forum, since doing so can help build credibility.

I think it's less having to do with building credibility, and more because as time spent on the forum increases, so does the inclination to take a look at the forum profile page and fill it in.

Put another way, if my intent is to join a forum, ask a few questions, and then forget about it, I'm going to the trouble of filling in every blank on the forum profile is not a good use of my time. If I intend for a forum to become one of my regular haunts and I want to become part of the regular community, however, I'm more likely to want others to know a little more about me.

One thing that is unique about this forum is the percentage of people who have their location accurately filled out. That's a base SMF forum feature that goes unused on a lot of forums (does it really help anyone to know that an answer to your tech support question came from Oklahoma?) but is practically required here. Even those who don't fill out the location in textual form tend to give some hint of it with their choice of avatar.

[J N Winkler]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

We do have high-value contributors on either side of the 1,000-post threshold.  I focused on the 10,000+ post group purely for convenience--there are few enough to make it manageable to load each person's profile in a separate browser tab, read off the age (if given), and use Windows' calculator app to compute the average.  Working with larger groups (such as the ~230 with more than 1,000 posts) gets into needing scripts to pull data and then spreadsheets to crunch numbers.

BTW, I estimate that members in the 10,000+ post group account for about one-third of the slightly more than 1 million posts on this forum.

[kalvado]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

We do have high-value contributors on either side of the 1,000-post threshold.  I focused on the 10,000+ post group purely for convenience--there are few enough to make it manageable to load each person's profile in a separate browser tab, read off the age (if given), and use Windows' calculator app to compute the average.  Working with larger groups (such as the ~230 with more than 1,000 posts) gets into needing scripts to pull data and then spreadsheets to crunch numbers.

BTW, I estimate that members in the 10,000+ post group account for about one-third of the slightly more than 1 million posts on this forum.

I wonder how difficult is it to modify forum script, at least temporarily, to include age or DOB in the userlist - for example instead of icq field.

[J N Winkler]

I wonder how difficult is it to modify forum script, at least temporarily, to include age or DOB in the userlist - for example instead of ICQ field.

I don't have admin rights, so I can't be sure, but it would not surprise me if the fields that are shown in the member list can be set in a configuration file or Web application.

One quick and dirty way of retrieving the information would be to write a NT batch script that loads each page of the member listing, dumps the 100 profile links per page to a text file, and then takes that file and loads each profile, dumping the age/DOB information (if provided) to a CSV file.  That would take about 4500 page loads and so maybe two hours to run over a reasonably fast broadband connection.

[dlsterner]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

Even 1000 posts may be a bit high of a lower bound.  I've thought of myself as an "average" contributor and have been on the forum since 2018, but I am still short of the 1000 post mark.  Maybe someday.

[Rothman]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

Even 1000 posts may be a bit high of a lower bound.  I've thought of myself as an "average" contributor and have been on the forum since 2018, but I am still short of the 1000 post mark.  Maybe someday.

Eh, you're just a low achiever.

[hotdogPi]

I think an algorithm that records the base 2 logarithm of the number of non-quoted characters would be a better metric, as currently short posts and long posts each count for 1. I know it's impossible with the forum software, but a script could measure it with existing posts. As an example for how the scoring works, a 200-character post would count as log2(200)≈7.64.

Note that I do not want a karma system; that would be this forum's downfall.

[Scott5114]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

We do have high-value contributors on either side of the 1,000-post threshold.  I focused on the 10,000+ post group purely for convenience--there are few enough to make it manageable to load each person's profile in a separate browser tab, read off the age (if given), and use Windows' calculator app to compute the average.  Working with larger groups (such as the ~230 with more than 1,000 posts) gets into needing scripts to pull data and then spreadsheets to crunch numbers.

BTW, I estimate that members in the 10,000+ post group account for about one-third of the slightly more than 1 million posts on this forum.

I wonder how difficult is it to modify forum script, at least temporarily, to include age or DOB in the userlist - for example instead of icq field.

It wouldn't be hard to do, but if you have the access to do it, it would be easier to just do an SQL SELECT statement to get the data you wanted.

[kalvado]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

We do have high-value contributors on either side of the 1,000-post threshold.  I focused on the 10,000+ post group purely for convenience--there are few enough to make it manageable to load each person's profile in a separate browser tab, read off the age (if given), and use Windows' calculator app to compute the average.  Working with larger groups (such as the ~230 with more than 1,000 posts) gets into needing scripts to pull data and then spreadsheets to crunch numbers.

BTW, I estimate that members in the 10,000+ post group account for about one-third of the slightly more than 1 million posts on this forum.

I wonder how difficult is it to modify forum script, at least temporarily, to include age or DOB in the userlist - for example instead of icq field.

It wouldn't be hard to do, but if you have the access to do it, it would be easier to just do an SQL SELECT statement to get the data you wanted.

It's more about giving at least temporary access to the data to those with enough enthusiasm....

[Scott5114]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

We do have high-value contributors on either side of the 1,000-post threshold.  I focused on the 10,000+ post group purely for convenience--there are few enough to make it manageable to load each person's profile in a separate browser tab, read off the age (if given), and use Windows' calculator app to compute the average.  Working with larger groups (such as the ~230 with more than 1,000 posts) gets into needing scripts to pull data and then spreadsheets to crunch numbers.

BTW, I estimate that members in the 10,000+ post group account for about one-third of the slightly more than 1 million posts on this forum.

I wonder how difficult is it to modify forum script, at least temporarily, to include age or DOB in the userlist - for example instead of icq field.

It wouldn't be hard to do, but if you have the access to do it, it would be easier to just do an SQL SELECT statement to get the data you wanted.

It's more about giving at least temporary access to the data to those with enough enthusiasm....

Yeah, but I mean, if you're going to hack some PHP anyway, why faff around with the forum software at all, when you could just dump the SQL results to a CSV or something for easy import to Excel?

[kalvado]

There's also many regular contributors with less than 10,000 posts that are aren't being included in the arbitrary 10,000+ analysis, which I'm not sure is fair to them. I've made a lot of posts here in a short time by most standards, but I don't think my age should have more weight simply because I've posted more. 1,000 posts would be a better cut-off point, but that becomes more complicated to calculate too.

We do have high-value contributors on either side of the 1,000-post threshold.  I focused on the 10,000+ post group purely for convenience--there are few enough to make it manageable to load each person's profile in a separate browser tab, read off the age (if given), and use Windows' calculator app to compute the average.  Working with larger groups (such as the ~230 with more than 1,000 posts) gets into needing scripts to pull data and then spreadsheets to crunch numbers.

BTW, I estimate that members in the 10,000+ post group account for about one-third of the slightly more than 1 million posts on this forum.

I wonder how difficult is it to modify forum script, at least temporarily, to include age or DOB in the userlist - for example instead of icq field.

It wouldn't be hard to do, but if you have the access to do it, it would be easier to just do an SQL SELECT statement to get the data you wanted.

It's more about giving at least temporary access to the data to those with enough enthusiasm....

Yeah, but I mean, if you're going to hack some PHP anyway, why faff around with the forum software at all, when you could just dump the SQL results to a CSV or something for easy import to Excel?

Let me put it so - that is probably 1 line of php that I could probably do myself vs... vs solving a separate problem and messing with database.
This may echo another thread here:
https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=32110.0
For me a small fix is a good enough one.

[Scott5114]

It's a few lines of PHP, sure. But now you have a bunch of HTML output you have to sift through if you want to do anything interesting (like calculate the average age of whatever slice of the membership) with it, and that's way, way more code to write (see J.N. Winkler's post about NT batch scripts, but Perl would be a far more suitable tool) than if you just exported the data to CSV in the first place.

[LilianaUwU]

No matter the average age, from what I've seen since I joined, we all have the sense of humour of a 12-year-old. 

[formulanone]

So it's 38.

Got it.

[kphoger]

I think it's less having to do with building credibility, and more because as time spent on the forum increases, so does the inclination to take a look at the forum profile page and fill it in.

Put another way, if my intent is to join a forum, ask a few questions, and then forget about it, I'm going to the trouble of filling in every blank on the forum profile is not a good use of my time. If I intend for a forum to become one of my regular haunts and I want to become part of the regular community, however, I'm more likely to want others to know a little more about me.

I just don't see the point in publicly revealing PII for no apparent reason.  I've mentioned my age or my birth year occasionally, when it seemed pertinent to the conversation, but generally my age just seems kind of irrelevant to the purposes of this forum.

Heck, if you hunt hard enough, you can find threads in which I posted my name and address.  It isn't that I'm worried about people knowing that information, necessarily, but rather that I just never thought there was any point to including it in my profile.  (Besides, with that PII buried in a mountain of thread posts, a person would have to do a LOT more hunting in order to do something nefarious.)

[webny99]

To throw yet another wrench in the works, it's interesting that around 75% of members with 10,000 posts (granted, very small sample size) display their age, while less than 20% do so when expanded to include all forum members. My guess is that publicly displaying your age and other personal information is at least loosely correlated to ones' commitment level to the forum, since doing so can help build credibility.

I think it's less having to do with building credibility, and more because as time spent on the forum increases, so does the inclination to take a look at the forum profile page and fill it in.

Put another way, if my intent is to join a forum, ask a few questions, and then forget about it, I'm going to the trouble of filling in every blank on the forum profile is not a good use of my time. If I intend for a forum to become one of my regular haunts and I want to become part of the regular community, however, I'm more likely to want others to know a little more about me.

Your second point is basically what I was trying to say. I guess "building credibility" was poor word choice, but I just meant that it displays an intent to be around for a while and be taken seriously as a regular contributor.

[Scott5114]

I think it's less having to do with building credibility, and more because as time spent on the forum increases, so does the inclination to take a look at the forum profile page and fill it in.

Put another way, if my intent is to join a forum, ask a few questions, and then forget about it, I'm going to the trouble of filling in every blank on the forum profile is not a good use of my time. If I intend for a forum to become one of my regular haunts and I want to become part of the regular community, however, I'm more likely to want others to know a little more about me.

I just don't see the point in publicly revealing PII for no apparent reason.  I've mentioned my age or my birth year occasionally, when it seemed pertinent to the conversation, but generally my age just seems kind of irrelevant to the purposes of this forum.

Heck, if you hunt hard enough, you can find threads in which I posted my name and address.  It isn't that I'm worried about people knowing that information, necessarily, but rather that I just never thought there was any point to including it in my profile.  (Besides, with that PII buried in a mountain of thread posts, a person would have to do a LOT more hunting in order to do something nefarious.)

I sort of agree, in that nobody should feel obligated to fill out the forum profile information completely, particularly if they feel there is no need for anyone to know that information. But I tend to take a pretty cavalier attitude about my own PII because all of it is very easily available through public records request. Because I own a public-facing LLC, you can query the Oklahoma Secretary of State about it and get my address, which, since I own a house, you can then confirm with county property assessment records. All of this is easily done from the Internet without needing to interact with a human at all.

That being said, I don't go out of my way to post my home address on the forum. But knowing all of this was possible made it feel pretty silly whenever customers at work would argue about being made to sign their credit card because they didn't want their identity to get stolen. (Certainly everyone in the US has their signature on some FOIA-able document or another, so it's not like your signature is secret. Even if it was, most people get so lazy with their signature that it is useless as an identity verification tool).