http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1002252


in reply to Perl Monks in numbers?

Nodes per month was roughly flat for PerlMonks since the start of 2001, and extra flat since the start of 2010. I have little clue how closely this related to the popularity of Perl more broadly.

There was a hump of growth across 2001-2006, with the end of 2005 and all of 2006 being a slow decline to a level about the same as the start of 2001. This was followed by a slow climb that peaked with a burst of spam around Aug 2009 which was followed by a shorter decline. Things have been quite flat since then except for maybe a recent growth in the rate at which new users sign up. Those two humps were relatively small compared to the baseline rate but since 2010 the rate has stayed very close to that baseline so the last 2.5 years has an average a little lower than most prior years.

I put up a chart as well. The lines represent

node
Number of nodes created each month, excluding reaped nodes (divided by 100)
reply
Number of replies created each month (divided by 100)
root
Root nodes created each month (divided by 10)
sopw
SoPW root nodes created each month (divided by 10)
user
New users each month (divided by 10)
user2
Same but excluding users that became zombie users
infra
Infrastructure nodes created each month (divided by 10)
catqa
Categorized Q+A nodes created each month (divided by 5)

To be clear, "root" includes all of "sopw" but does not include categorized questions (those root nodes are only included in "catqa").

- tye