Shmups.com Forum users & posts...

[ST Dragon]

Out of curiosity, I checked the Member list statistics and… out of the 1164 registered users, only 190 of them have made any more than 100 posts. The remaining 974 have not even passed the 100 posts.

It’s considerable that 760 users have made less than 20 posts!

That’s surprising if you consider how fast the forums get updated. At times it almost feels like a chat room rather than a message board.
Almost in real time!

So far the King of posters is: dave4shmups followed by a close 2nd: BulletMagnet (with the cool Life Force Parody Avatar) and 3rd: captain ahar (with the Pirate Kitty avatar).

[PFG 9000]

In my experience, that's how most forums are. The bulk of the registered users either lurk without posting or post a few times and then leave. There is a small number of people who post for a few months and then wander off, and then there is a handful known as the regulars, the oldbies, who have been at the forum seemingly forever and have post counts well into the 1000's.

[mannerbot]

It's not so much the oldbies that have the most posts, it's the guys that read and respond to every topic. It is pretty crazy that only 190 registered users have hit triple digits though, considering the casual atmosphere of this forum.

[ST Dragon]

hey! This was my 666th post...

And what about you my friend... are you one of the "regulars" or are you going to wander off, into the shadows in a few months time...?

[StealthNinjaScyther]

There are also lifetime lurkers like me, staying around but posting very little. Sadly, this habit follows my social patterns in the real world...

[ST Dragon]

Hence your Nick name "Stealth"

That Samurai Mecha in your avatar is cool.
What Anime or game is it from?

I also noticed that the majority of the people here are from North America & Europe (USA, Canada, UK & Germany in particular) quite a few guys from Sweden, Finland, Italy, Japan & Australia, very few people from Latin America, not a single soul from the vast plains of Africa, very few people from the rest of Asia (other than Japan) and one lone dude from Alaska.

[Vexorg]

Also consider that post counts got reset when we moved from the Mk2 forum to the current one. I don't think you'd find a whole lot of difference overall though.

[Nemo]

That Samurai Mecha in your avatar is cool.
What Anime or game is it from?

I believe that is Hagane.

and one lone dude from Alaska.

[MovingTarget]

The one other forum I visit has several users with over 30,000 posts, and one user with 44,000. Its quite a big forum.

As has been said before, with most forums the vast majority of the members no longer visit or are lurkers.

[ST Dragon]

That Samurai Mecha in your avatar is cool.
What Anime or game is it from?

I believe that is Hagane.

and one lone dude from Alaska.

Yeah, it looks like hagane. Even though the adds of Hagane I remember in the game mags back in 1995, looked completly diffrent to the Hagane I played via emulation 6 years later....


And your avatar is that retched worm thing from Gradius Gaiden, am I not right?
I love the sound it makes when it blows up.
I need to dig that GG disc from the pile & start playing again.

[ST Dragon]

The one other forum I visit has several users with over 30,000 posts, and one user with 44,000. Its quite a big forum.

As has been said before, with most forums the vast majority of the members no longer visit or are lurkers.

Could you link me to that forum please?
Sounds interesting....

Thanks in advance.

[iatneH]

I'll post here often because I feel like people are reasonably intelligent, and moreover, people here share my strange and scorned video gaming tastes!

I lurk around GameFAQs but I hardly ever create topics because nobody ever understands what I say. If I post in an existing topic, it dies soonafter.

With that said, I do make more than my fair share of decidedly unintelligent posts here...

[undamned]

...and then there is a handful known as the regulars, the oldbies, who have been at the forum seemingly forever and have post counts well into the 1000's.

Yeah, I'm not all about post count, but many of us (and I'm not even one of the original originals) have been here for 3 gens of the shmups forum and every time we get a new one, we start over.
-ud

[professor ganson]

I'm a relative newbie here, but I'm not going anywhere. If anything I should have more time to spend here as my kids get older and less difficult to take care of and my job becomes more routine.

[PsikyoPshumpPshooterP]

im a newbie too..i duno how i found out about this forum..(the old one) but it was a lot more interesting than shoryuken.com

[ST Dragon]

Also one more interesting fact… Out of the 1164 registered users, how many are actually female shmupers?
Girls?

I used to go out with this chick & when I offered her to play a 2-Player game on Ikaruga (DC), she actually proved to be pretty good on her 1st go, with absolutely no experience in shooters & almost no background in video games what so ever.
Beginner luck? Maybe, but she was better than my mate who sucks big time in shmups, even after all these years!

I asked her if she liked the game & she said that it was cool & very different to what she had vaguely seen at the arcades & computers.
She had only played Puzzle Bobble, Tetris, Mario & Sonic in the past.
She doesn’t like message boards though, let alone shmuping ones!

But I must say that video games & especially shooters are not addressed to women.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

It bothers me to see people with ridiculously high post counts calling themselves No0b$. What's a newbie, then?

[Icarus]

Yeah, I'm not all about post count, but many of us (and I'm not even one of the original originals) have been here for 3 gens of the shmups forum and every time we get a new one, we start over.
-ud

I think there has been about five generations of the forum, actually.
This one, Gamespy, Network54, and two before that (listed in chronological order, most recent first). That doesn't include the temporary forum that Malc has up at shmups.com, in case of emergencies.

[JBC]

Honestly i've always hated post counts. I think they cause people to get pompous sometimes. Then again i can see how some people would like them but i prefer when there just not there. It's better for people to look at how much time you've spent there rather than how many one word posts you've made. Although this forum seems to be somewhat unaffected by ridiculous things like that.

Maybe they should set it to where your account deletes if you dont post for 3 months? or maybe 6?

[ST Dragon]

Yeah, I'm not all about post count, but many of us (and I'm not even one of the original originals) have been here for 3 gens of the shmups forum and every time we get a new one, we start over.
-ud

I think there has been about five generations of the forum, actually.
This one, Gamespy, Network54, and two before that (listed in chronological order, most recent first). That doesn't include the temporary forum that Malc has up at shmups.com, in case of emergencies.

I didn't know this forum was that old to have 5 generations?! Is this a bit exaggerated?

I thought Retrogames.com, Geoshock, Romshares, segaxtreme forums, which have been around since 2000, had 3-4 generations the most, but 5?!

Interesting...

[Minzoku]

Also one more interesting fact… Out of the 1164 registered users, how many are actually female shmupers?
Girls?

I think I'm the only regular these days or the only one that will 'fess up to it

I've pretty much only been on Neopets lately, though but hey, at least they're updating their ONE shmup now ...from tate to yoko

[nZero]

I didn't know this forum was that old to have 5 generations?! Is this a bit exaggerated?

I thought Retrogames.com, Geoshock, Romshares, segaxtreme forums, which have been around since 2000, had 3-4 generations the most, but 5?!

Retrogames (and ZTNet as a whole) hasn't changed forum systems since 2000. Most places aren't so stagnant.

[Icarus]

I didn't know this forum was that old to have 5 generations?! Is this a bit exaggerated.

Not exaggerated at all. I've been around a lot longer than most (before Malc moved the site to Classicgaming, when it was still hosted on his ISP's webspace), and I can remember all the old site and forum iterations quite clearly.

The first one was quite a simple one to support a community of say 40 regulars - alamone, Twitch, Akira, Malc, bloodf, Felix among others - but died from server problems.

The second one was a registered hosted forum (registered to Malc) and the place where the community began to expand. IIRC the Trading Station was planned for this iteration but didn't take off, and the Highscore Challenges began here, starting with Dodonpachi. This forum version died from hacking and spam flooding from stupid users (Rommel!!).

The third one was at Network54, and the community started to grow exponentially. The Trading Station took off here, somewhat regular strategy discussion started to appear, and it was good for a time (with the exception of Raymond McKeithen's appearance, of course). This one died from popup flooding and invasive advertising spam.

The fourth was at Gamespy. Most here will have joined when the forum was hosted there, and will remember what happened to it quite recently. If you need a refresher, Gamespy's servers went *boom* and the massive store of info on the old databases is virtually unretrievable.

The fifth is this one, ran by our very capable admin and mod team.

If you count the emergency forum that Malc has up at shmups.com, then that's six generations of the forum. There's also been at least four versions of the main site as well, to my memory. That's quite a long and illustrious history for a huge site.

[benstylus]

I do a lot of reading here, not too much posting.

I have managed to get over 100 though!

[Ganelon]

I used to lurk occasionally in the network54 days. I wasn't ever in my "shooter mood" those days. As it fluctuates on and off, I come here more and less, respectively.

[jp]

Yeah, I've been posting here since the Gamespot era (think I first came here in... 02? 03? Somewhere in there). Though I typically have a few months of a lot of activity, then I'll leave, then I'll come back, then I'll leave... blah. I do that with every forum I frequent though.

[Shatterhand]

When I met this site, it was already "Owned" by Akira, Felix the Cat... and someone else I forgot the name.. (Ugh, I remember he had a nice site with soundtracks)

So I begun in the Network54 forum (Which back at that time did NOT call Network54, though I cant remember what name it was).

I came here because Akira used to post in Emulation Talk (An Amiga forum which also was in Network 54), and he had the url for this site in his signature.

And because of this, now I look at a collection os Saturn shmups.... I'd never have a saturn if it wasnt because of this site

[uwfan]

i alo first begun in the network54 days...... 2001/02/?

Im happy i found this site!

[bluberry]

I just tend to drop off the face of the internet (save a couple of sites) every now and then. WON'T HAPPEN AGAIN SIR

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

I got back into Shmups thanks to Einhander and ran into the site when looking for more Shmups. That should've been around mid-2003. I guess I fall into the n0oB category, but who cares, I'm really a n0oB since I can only play Gradius Gaiden really well.