So, to satiate my personal curiousity about the rate at which the project is growing, I decided to do some statistical analysis on our posts per month for the 39 months that have passed since August 2006. (Don't ask me what the significance of that date is; it's just the oldest forum data displayed on the forum's Statistic Center.)
To that end, I present these two graphs. The y-axis shows the total number of posts made in a month, and the x-axis shows the passage of time in months up to the present day. Yeah, I know, I should have labeled the axes. :p
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/5482/ilathidgraphs.jpgAs you can see in the first graph, there is a somewhat cyclical pattern for group posting activity. It seems that after a sudden peak, a slow decline in activity gradually occurs, followed at last by another sudden burst of frenetic energy.
It can also be seen that the peak total posts have slowly risen over time, indicating that our overall work capacity has increased. However, our lows are still as low as ever, which may show that we lack the numbers to maintain a steady flow of activity.
In the second graph, I assigned a linear best fit line to the data. This was an arbitrary decision, since other kinds of best fit lines may actually provide a better fit, but I didn't feel like putting that much effort into this. :p So, imprecision aside, the best fit line shows a gradually increasing trend of posts per month. The best fit equation was y = 3x + 50 (I rounded because there's no way all those digits are significant) which predicts that at our current rate of growth there will be an average of about 253 posts/month this time next year. (Right now there are about 175/month according the best fit line.) Will this actually happen? Wish I knew. But it is interesting.
