On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 22:30:57 +0000 (UTC), "Nick M V Salmon"
<spam_dump@btinternet.com> wrote:

"Vector" <vector@vector.net> wrote

Vector <vector@vector.net> wrote:

I made a post patting myself on the back at the 6,000 mark about 20
hours ago ... at which time I stood at 23,919th place.  In twenty
hours, I slipped five whole notches to 23,924th place.  : (

Well, less than two days later, I've risen to 23,891th place.
What's going on here?  With a user base of millions, there must be at
least a million active users, how can such a large glitch in stats
happen?

Lots of folks send results to Berkeley in batches - I upload once or twice a
day from SetiQueue, citca 73 results/day at the moment.  Plnty folks only
upload once a week, Friday night seems to be a favourite.  If you look at
http://cricket.berkeley.edu:8885/inr-668-interfaces.html you'll see that
there are a lot of blips 'on-the-hour' where folks queing add-ons go online.
All of that causes blips in ranking...

Number of 'active users' isn't as large as you might think;
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/numusers.html looks like about 600,000 at
the moment...

Ok, that does explain it.  But as I was checking out the graphs, I had
to wonder what happened November 2002 on the New Users graph at the
bottom of the page?