Story statistics

[Heathcliff]

A thread in the Snake Pit about forum stories got me interested in testing some of my assumptions about the stories sub-forum. As I'm a maths geek I thought I would gather some data to see. I went through the first page of the stories forum, noting down some information about the posts. Here are the results (which hopefully someone will find interesting.)

Note: to save myself time I made certain basic assumptions: that tags were correct, that forum profiles were correct and up-to-date, etc. It may not be 100% accurate but I hope it's close. Percentages are approximate.

Total stories on page one:

44

Gender of sneezers in story:

Male: 30 (68.2%)

Female: 7 (15.9%)

Male and Female: 6 (13.6%)

Unclear: 1 (2.3%)

Original or fanfiction:

Original: 15 (34.1%)

Fanfiction: 28 (63.6%)

Both (drabble): 1 (2.6%)

Type of thread:

Regular story: 31 (70.5%)

Drabble: 10 (22.7%)

Role-play: 3 (6.8%)

Gender of author (or thread starter, where there's more than one author):

Male: 4 (9.0%)

Female: 38 (86.4%)

Unspecified: 2 (4.5%)

Age of author (or thread starter, where there's more than one author):

Under 18: 14 (31.8%)

18-30: 23 (52.3%)

30-40: 2 (4.5%)

Unspecified: 5 (11.4%)

This is only a tiny fraction of the stories that have been posted on the forum- but it seems like we are justified in saying that most new stories are fanfiction, featuring male sneezing, by female authors.

I'm a bit surprised by the age results- I had assumed most of the stories (fanfiction especially) were being posted by under 18s, but that's not really the case.

[Jorm]

Most of this lined up pretty well with what I would have guessed, but it's cool to see a sample laid out in stats. Kudos to you for taking the time to compile this.

[murphy dee]

Yes, this is really impressive, great work! I, too, am a little surprised by the ages.

[Pilgrim]

This is pretty cool! Not at all surprising, but cool! ^.^

[alyssa]

This is awesome! Thanks for putting this together, it's really interesting

[zneeze]

Very cool! I'm not surprised about the age layout, though: I'd wager we have more active members between 18-30 years old than under 18; younger members may be newer and therefore less eager to share fiction; and some of our good and most consistent writers (chanel, NoV) are between 18-30 I believe.