You and your dang hot threads.
 

To answer the poll you're all going to have to do a bit of math and a bit of work. The goal of the thread is to give folk a realistic idea of what they can expect when starting new threads.

To do this, I'd like you all to do a search for all of the threads that you've started. You can use the box titled "Search by User Name", type in your name and select "Find Threads Started by User". You're also going to want to Select "Thread Start Date" and "In Ascending Order" under the title "Sort Results by"

Here is mine.

You can see that I've started 30 threads, 5 of which have the "hot thread" icon on the left. So, 5/30= 16.7% of my threads. I realize that quite of few of you have more than 10x the number of threads and I don't expect you to count them all. What I'd like you all to do is check out your first 40 threads.

An example (from Willravel's post history - I didn't think he'd mind). You can see 40 threads, 12 with the hot thread tags giving us 12/40 or 30%

The idea here is to give newcomers and idea of what to expect when they start out. And hopefully, some very concrete evidence to help them not get discouraged from posting new threads, just because the first one or two flop or they feel like they're not in the 'in' crowd.

Maybe I did my search differently than you, but I ended up with 0/40 for myself.
Though when I sorted them by their number of views, I saw a fascinating trend! Some of my threads with very few responses have gotten more than a thousand views. Now that is crazy to me -- that many times viewed, and yet so few wanted to respond. Crazy.

Out of the first 40 results, 11 had received a "hot thread" thing, so 27.5%.

I have some autoposts that uses my ID so mine is skewed. I'm 1/40.

I think mine is skewed due to where the threads I have started have been posted...(ie. TE).

10/38

My Alzheimers must be kicking in, I wouldn't have thought I started that many topics.

16 out of 40...which is more than I thought. On the other end of the spectrum, I've started several with five replies or less, a few with only one or two, and one with none at all.

Interesting.

10/40 = 25%

Guess I'm your posting opposite Cinn

1/50 with the hot tag

20/50 with 5 or fewer replies

:P

70/239

based on views and not replies from the looks of it?

18 out of 40 had a red icon. The rest were total fail. Seems like a decent average.

The lame "skinny jeans on guys" thread I posted last year has like ~20k hits. Damn.

Out of 11 threads I started, 1 music, 2 found on net, 7 birthday, 1 other. Zero of mine were hot. Not even the birthday ones. Now if I started a thread in politics, people would probably be getting in line just to whop me on the head.

10/40. But no red ones since April!

5 out of 40

I start most of my threads in Artwork, and those threads tend to get less traffic, fewer responses. Maybe because it's all about me.

I haven't had coffee, and so I didn't follow instructions properly at first.

First, I filtered out Tilted Staff threads, which includes report threads and the like.

At first I calculated 77 out of 259 threads (so 30%).

However, the first 40 had 9 (so 23%).

Oh my bad, 1st 40 is

11/40

guess that bumps me to 36%

9/40. But 6 of those are discussions in the staff area and 2 are rules/guidelines in various spots.

Wait, is this some kind of elitist popularity contest?

No, it's a performance appraisal.

Absolutely NOT. This thread was inspired by Cynthetiq's 'Evolve or Die' and the so many we've had before like it, where someone always point's out the cliquish nature of TFP and how nobody responds to their threads.

It's trending right now more or less exactly how I thought it would. People aren't going to respond to threads just because you're you until you've been here and established yourself for a while, and if you look at the results less than 1/3 of threads started by most new folks break even the meager "hot thread" threshold.

In other words, if you're new and not a lot of folks respond to your first few threads don't get discouraged, (almost) everyone has been there.

Sorry, should have thrown up my "just kidding" tags. I've been actively involved in Cynthetiq's "Or Die" thread.

I was hoping for humor given that many of us that have posted in this thread have been accused of being the TFP Elite.

Generally speaking, the people that post in here are the ones that make TFP happen. Everybody else? Well, yeah.

I got 13/40, or roughly one third.

I actually thought it was lower too. I guess we tend to discount our own threads, somehow.

Well, I certainly wasn't taking you seriously :). It was for the benefit of those who might and to generally elaborate about the point of this little exercise.

It might also be useful to talk about why people don't produce a bunch of hot threads right when they start. I'm going with OP construction as my first choice. TFP is a somewhat unique place on the internet and creating an OP that will satisfy us is perhaps not the easiest task, so there is a bit of a learning curve.

I never noticed that red icon before. Looks like I'm at 12/40.

What is the criteria for getting the hot thread icon?
And the "Views" count; is that total views or unique visitor views?

30 replies or 500 views. It's listed on the bottom footer of each subforum.

7/21, so I polled in the wrong place.

I should probably be more careful...

11/66 for me. It's funny, I started a new thread the other day after not starting one for over a year and a half.

I counted 11 with a red thingy.

A thread I started titled "You've got to have a pig" got more than 3000 views? Now I know what you people want to read about.

It doesn't look like I really start threads, but I've only been on here a little over a year.

So 4 hot threads out of 15 = 26.67%

I haven't started may threads so I've got 2/13 that hit hot, mostly from looking it appears.

However of the 13 post, 9 were in Humor and you don't really reply to a joke. So eliminating those 9 from the 13 and I'm 2/4 or 50%. Who knew.

Something else that may be worth looking at is what forums we're posting into. Here is a breakdown of percentage of threads with 30 or greater replies from the last year in descending order by forum. I didn't count 'stuck' threads.

53.9% Politics
45.6% Sexuality
36.1% General
32.7% Philosophy
29.5% Sports
27.0% Life
25.7% Knowledge & How To
25.0% Ladies Lounge
18.1% Weaponry
16.7% Gaming
08.3% Motors
07.1% Technology

so nonsense and humor don't count?

17/74 were "flaming" :lol:
Please don't make me do math,
I can't remember how to figure that as a percentage.
Funny thing is... my longest thread started was about
talking in public restrooms.

Well, this was spawned principally from the 'evolve or die' thread which centered around conversation and meaningful dialogue, which I don't think is the point in either nonsense or humor. I also wasn't particularly interested in doing all the forums for the sake of time (You may have also noted I also skipped the entire creativity section as well as forums not specifically for the kind of discussion we're talking about, new users, events etc.). I was just illustrating the point that where you post your threads may matter just as much as what you post in them.

For the curious
57.3% in Nonsense
01.3% in humor




noodle: 17/74=.2297 -> 22.97%

22.9%, noodle.

You just divide them?
Oh man, now I feel entirely stupid.
Yes, Victoria, there is a Brain Fag... and it is not
a culturally bound syndrome. It's real!

they don't increase your post count.

12 of 40, excluding mod forum and rules posts. And god damn, I was whiny back then. Some people say if they could travel back in time they'd kill Hitler. I'd go back to freshman year of college and punch myself in the dick.

Don't. I remember one of the hardest lessons to learn from college for quite a few students was that fractions are decimals are percentages.

12 out of 40. Who knew?