This morning I was thinking about how large the forum is. I recalled Kaz! mentioning that he had downloaded the entire forum onto his hard drive and that it was something like 98 megabytes in size. I'm sure it's grown since then.

It seems that the majority of people who post here regularly use the Recent Messages page exclusively to view and post messages. On the main RM page, you don't see the messages in a threaded format like you do on the MF main page. Once you've opened a specific post, then you can see all the replies to it in a threaded format.

So sometimes it is hard to tell which messages are "original" messages (in other words, the first message in a full thread) and which ones are responses. The fact that we can change the subject line of our messages to something new even when replying to someone else's post only exacerbates this situation, at least when using the RM page to read the forum.

The previous two paragraphs are pertinent to this post because of the path my thoughts took this morning. I began wondering what the ratio of original, thread-starting posts on the forum is to the response posts. It's pretty obvious that the responses are going to vastly outnumber the original posts, since we have a very healthy, interactive and vibrant forum here. I'm just curious what the actual ratio is. Not that I want to spend all my waking hours tallying it up...I'll leave that to the likes of Kaz! (:oP)

Of course the forum is constantly growing, so an exact count would be impossible. I guess I'll have to settle for an average.

Another thought I had along the same lines was that there are three kinds of people posting to the forum: Originators, Responders, and those who tend to do about the same amount of both ("Originonders?" "Respoginators?"). Are you the type of person who tends to think of and post original, thread-starting messages, or are you more the type who tends to respond to what others have said? Or do you do both?

I would put myself in the "Responders" category. This very post might seem to belie that statement. It's pretty long; it's all my own thoughts and I hope that it generates a lot of discussion, but despite all that, it's a rarity. I tend to respond to others' thoughts more easily than to put out my own.

I would put Howard in the "Originator" category. It seems like the majority of his posts are original posts. They might not all be major thread-starters, but they're all his. I know he responds a lot too, but his responses are often quick one-liners, designed to get a laugh. I think Howard is more in his element when it comes to posting original material. Howard, if you disagree with me on this, I'd like to hear your perspective on it!

Of course, strict definitions like these really aren't accurate. The way threads on this message forum have a tendency to evolve or dissolve from one topic into another, a "response" post can actually become the start of a huge new thread, even though it wasn't intended as anything but a reply. I've gone back and read some of the old threads from the earlier days of the forum, and noticed that many of the longest threads are examples of this phenomenon. I wonder what strange and wonderful discussions this original message will spawn? Maybe it won't spawn anything, but just sit here and take up a few bytes of memory. Who knows?

Gri"going for 'longest forum thread ever' new record!"shny