Trends in forum usage

I imagine ROOL keep an eye on this, but it would be interesting to see some longitudinal statistics describing the usage of the Forum. The latest addition of users registering themselves has brought the total of users to (I think) 5,759. But more telling would be an analysis over time of the numbers of users (both active and dormant), and how their activity here has varied following significant events such as new RPis, open-sourcing, software announcements, etc.).

Anyone agree that this might inform new RISC OS marketing efforts?

My longitude is 2° 37’ 49.3" W

North West France (that’s as close as I’ll say in public).
As for marketing, don’t bother. My wage is not great and there’s a bunch of things more important than tech that I’m saving up for (such as a replacement toy car).
Been around since the days of 6502, with a brief hiccup between 2002 and 2009 (or was it 2010?).
Usually dormant until I’ve had my third cup of tea. :-)

System – primarily ARMv7 Pi2, RISC OS 5.23 ¹, networking via Vonets and a switch. I speak C, BASIC, assembler, and something that passes for bad French.

Non smoker. No drugs. No alcohol. Known to consume vast quantities of tea ² and Mars bars. Spends way too long watching crappy sci-fi movies ³. At least Prime and Netflix both have “+10s” buttons so one can fast forward through the rubbishy bits.

Employed, not in tech.

I have a website, my own domain, and I wrote my own blog software (php) in part to avoid selling my soul to something like WordPress and in part because I was bored and felt like doing it. Boredom is a great motivator – look at how nice the lawn is now… ;-)

Currently COVID free. I hope it stays that way.

Anything else you’d like to know?

¹ My weather station software opens a handle to serial device via SerialUSB. This tends to throw weird errors under 5.25 or later after a random amount of time, but it works flawlessly with 5.23 so I don’t yet see a convincing reason to upgrade and/or write my software to try again if it borks.

² Note – tea is serious business, don’t try passing off lightly coloured water as “tea”. It won’t end well.

³ I wanted to like Life, I really did. But my heart sunk when I heard the rockets in the vacuum of space and, well, it turns out that it just kept on getting worse. If there was a decision to be made, these characters instinctively choose the worst possible option. I also wanted to like Jeruzalem but the primary character was the most annoying protagonist I’ve come across in a while. The only reason I kept on was for all the scenery of Jerusalem (even through the POV of Google Glass!) because it isn’t a place that turns up often in movies. At least Ash vs Evil Dead is an audience pleaser that doesn’t take itself too seriously (though why do I find Ash comes across like a bad Elvis impersonator?). And that’s just this week. ;-)

Looks at his pale mug of tea-lifeline… (yoda voice) “And so begun the Tea War has…!” ;)
I know I’ll be on the losing side – my surrender is in the post!

Any nation where tea is delivered as a cup of hot water and a separate teabag just doesn’t understand tea – and has probably never tasted it.
Canada at least seems to get it right.

Tea: taken to Aldershot.

[there was a greasy spoon there (Aldershot) that served a decent cuppa, and a reasonably priced All Day Breakfast so long as you didn’t look to hard at what was passing as meat]