And what will that indicate?
Regulars are value contributors. But you could say, "you are sorting people by -- and we do -- how many days they come back." For example, you go into some of our tech support newsgroups, and you'll find that there are people who have contributed every day in the month. OK, those are regulars. But how do you know they have value? It's not just the number of days you come back. There are three other metrics, which tend to be ratios. One is the ratio of replies: how many times did you reply to someone else, or start a thread? Spammers may show up every day, but they don't reply. With a very low reply-to-post ratio, I would say that that is a person who starts a lot of conversations but never replies to anyone else, and it's probably a spammer. Showing up every day is not enough -- you have to respond to other people. It's also thread-to-post. How many threads did you touch, how many messages did you write? If you wrote 10 times, all into one thread, that's a low ratio. You have a high conversational concentration.
Is that good or bad?
I'm a social scientist -- I don't know the difference between good and bad, only the difference between difference. Do I like flame warriors? Or don't I? A high reply-to-post indicates a flame warrior, because they tell you you're an idiot and they put all their messages into a few threads -- so they also have a low thread-to-post ratio.
If you want to find the answer person, flip that ratio around. They differ from the flame warrior in the following way: both show up every day, and both reply. The answer person answers a post once or twice, then moves on. We've seen people post 500 messages in one week in one thread. If you have that much time on your hands -- it's not to say that it's a good thing or a bad thing, but a different thing. We give you the opportunity to say, "I just came here because I can't print." We will guide you to the very real group of people who are dedicated, for whatever reason, to not just computer technology, but answering questions about knitting, horseback riding, dogs -- you name it. And the way to do that is to start looking at the social accounting metadata about authors.
