There are a lot of people who join here(16,835 to date) but a great majority of them have never posted once and the others usually post couple times get an answer for something they were looking for and never come back which is lame. The reality is that there are probably 200-300 active members(most likely less) and out of that there are probably 50 that are constantly contributing(those are the ones with no lives :-Dj/k). Peter would be able to give a better number on the active members thing though.
David (BrickStoneOven) has correctly assessed the situation.
The forum does have a lot of members but, as David noted, most of them do not actively participate on the forum. In fact, several years ago, when the forum was much smaller and the membership numbers were much more manageable, I studied the membership rolls and concluded that close to 85-90% of the members either never entered a single post or no more than one post. The membership rules have changed since that time, but the same pattern of non-participation persists. Under current rules, one is required to register to gain access to the benefits and features of the forum. Most members who do so do it because they want access to recipes (they are especially fond of clones of chain pizzas), to seek help, to use the forum's search features, and/or to communicate with other members via the Private Message (PM) backbone. They cannot do any of these things without registering.
New members are also required to enter introductory posts as part of the registration process. This allows members to introduce themselves to the rest of the members but that procedure also helps the forum by keeping spammers, spambots and other undesirables off of the forum. There is sometimes a flurry of activity that comes out of introductory posts, but only a small percent of them escape the introductory posts to go on to become active members. They almost never become Supporting Members. As an aside, I might mention that a hot area among new members is ovens--everything from wood-fired ovens, to commercial deck ovens, to LBEs, to MBEs, to 2Stone units and to grills. Mobile ovens are also a hot topic. However, I think is safe to say that most of the members, and other visitors to the forum, have standard unmodified home ovens. What they usually want to know is how best to use their home (or apartment) ovens to make basic pizzas at low cost. Because these members are non-participants, they constitute a large, silent majority that most people are unaware exist.
The heart and soul of the forum is represented by a fairly small group of members. They are responsible for the bulk of the posts on the forum and are the main source of help to those who ask for help. They also constitute the source of most of the Supporting Members on the forum. I would place the size of that core group at around 50 members, although the composition of that group will and does change over time. There are also perhaps a couple hundred members more who regularly read the posts on the forum but do not post as actively as they once did. Most of the members in the forgoing group are home pizza makers and pizza hobbyists, and they are in the artisan mold, as the popularity of the Neapolitan style of pizza and wood-fired ovens owned by our members attests. Some of these members will no doubt graduate from amateur to professional status, just as has happened in the past, but that number will be small. There are also members of the forum who are already professionals, and some are able to actively participate even when they have their own businesses to manage, but the number of such professionals is small. Most professional members who come to the forum are looking for free advice and, to the extent they get it, they move on and return only when they need more help. Since our forum is oriented more to pizza making rather than the business side, I often send those members over to the PMQ Think Tank.
As far as the idea of a jobs bank of some sort is concerned, I am personally in favor of anything that helps one of our members find a job or an opportunity to fullfill a dream of becoming a professional. Several years ago, Steve entertained the idea of a separate forum for professionals but we were so busy building this forum that a decision was made not to go with a professionals forum. As an alternative, we decided to go with the Shop Talk board to address concerns of the few professionals that were likely to visit our forum, given that the PMQ Think Tank and the Pizza Today bulletin board was where most professionals went. As the owner of the forum, it is Steve's call as to whether a jobs bank of some sort should be entertained in the light of the forum demographics discussed above and, if so, how it should be managed. pizzaheaven might want to approach Steve directly with his proposition by sending Steve a PM.
Peter
