We almost used our usual “Rescued from Memory Hole” prefix on this thread, as the argument could be made that it should be (the website in question is no longer live on the web, and of course the old LGF comments are hidden to non-registered visitors).  Engineer No. 6 stumbled upon something rather humorous sitting in the tanks, and we thought we’d share. Presenting…LGF thread #9033:

It’s an old thread from 2003, and link to Shawn’s site no longer works, but a little plug-n-play with the wayback machine reveals this:

Yea, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. That is the long-lost “Designed by LGF” stamp in the sidebar:

So here comes the funny part. Engineer No. 6 put together a handy video summary of the exchange in the comment section, and it probably sheds some light on why Johnson might have implemented the registration requirement for commenting about 6 months later:

(for future reference, when CJ says “Full Disclosure..”)

And for one last LOL…

As we’ve mentioned, the old LGF comments are hidden. But if you scroll over the nic of the last commenter on those threaded archives, it will reveal some of the content of that last comment. So, I employed a little snip tool kung-fu, and we can document that at least an unregistered visitor can see this:

(for now)

The other day, in response to something posted by a commenter at The Atlantic, Johnson posted this:

The BRC would like to remind our old pal CJ never to say things with such certainty and conviction. For it only took The World’s Greatest Blog Search Engine™ 0.05 seconds to discover that, after all these years, there are still a few more dues to be paid:

Kudos to one of our newest contributors, CroMagnon, for pointing out that Johnson has a YouTube channel under the nic “lizardoid” (not sure if that was ever noted here before), and that his famously keen sensitivity to racist and bigoted comments apparently doesn’t extend to that realm. Heck, the very first video I clicked on contained this in the comment section:

To illustrate the rampant comment section further, CroMagnon has produced a nice little video montage:

At current count, Lizardoid has 43 videos that he’s uploaded over the past 5 years (most of them appear to be older), and the only one I spotted that doesn’t have an open comment section is the latest one about Ron Paul in front of the Confederate Flag (just so everyone is on the same page, anyone with a youtube account can remove -or label as “spam”- individual comments from their own channel, and even disable commenting from uploaded videos altogether. ) Many of these comments have been greeting visitors to his channel for years:

I suppose the logical question would be if Johnson would classify the racism on his own YouTube channel as “right wing”?

In the spirit of thoroughness, and since we’re still scratching our heads on this one, the BRC is going to take the opportunity to revisit a memory-holed LGF thread we featured back in October 2010, and update everyone with the complete text and all 79 comments from long-lost #6276.

First, the original screencap I grabbed from the wayback machine (while it was still unblocked by Johnson):

And now, we present the complete thread, as nabbed by ISTE while CJ was asleep at the switch:

Read more…

Now that the BRC has released the registration stats, we thought it might make sense to follow with a resurrection of a Johnson comment that rests in the “hidden” portion of the LGF archives. The following is from back in a day when insta-banishment wasn’t something that was celebrated:

This is a screencap that can be tossed around, and rubbed in some faces, because we know that if we fast-forward to 2012, the current level is much, much higher than 0.02%. Certainly, it is high enough to preclude Johnson from bringing it up voluntarily like this. These days, we’re guessing it would take some arm-twisting.

Given the current environment of sock hunts and troll “roastings”, a more interesting question might actually be whether a current loozard would have the temerity to ask. But we probably know the answer to that one.

Nevertheless, I think this is worth pressing. Tweet and retweet, spread the word.

Somebody ask @lizardoid what the current #LGF banning level is. The #BRC determines 12% at least, possibly 20%+. twitpic.com/8hfbhx—
  (@ChenZhen) February 09, 2012

In the meantime, we might as well give it a whirl, right?

OK, well, we know that the level is at least 12%, since we have a confirmed list of 4,253 blocked accounts that Engineer no. 2 grabbed nearly a year ago, and we just mentioned that the total accounts currently sit at ~35,580.

Unfortunately, this is where our conjecture begins. Here’s what else we know:

The ~4200 banned nics was the total gleaned from a sample of ~20,000 nics about a year ago. Assuming that this is a statistically sound sample we should deduce that the overall level should be closer to 21%.

However…

The sample we grabbed represents nearly all the accounts that have registered at least one comment*. Lurker accounts and stunt socks weren’t included, due to the methodology. So, I suppose the debate could swing either way on how this effects our findings.

But maybe CJ will just give us an update, yeah?

*According to our data, ~37% of all LGF registered accounts have never commented.

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Update: We’re embarrassed to say it, and I can’t believe that nobody checked CJ’s math there, but 381/15000 = 0.0254 = ~2.5%.  Johnson was only off by 100x (which is probably par for the course with regard to LGF’s statistics)

OK, I was just going to giggle privately, but this is too rich.  It would seem that the old adage “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” totally escaped Johnson on this one:

I hope I’m not the only one who thought there might be some problematic side effects with this “feature”. Forget the childish nicknames that are bound to show up in there, or as a reader, the hassle of associating two names in any given thread. With the way that he clumsily set this up, Charles managed to turn his comment section into a giant confusing mess. It took only minutes for a perfect example to show up. Check out this exchange:

Odd, isn’t it? Because the quote button captures the text and display name at the time it’s pressed, and because that text doesn’t change when the user changes their display name, you’re going to have this little problem. A lot.

But hey, at least it references the comment number right? OK, while a reader scratches their head, we click on that little comment # link, and we see this:

Yes, you’re reading that right, that is a third name associated with that same comment (the actual username, we assume).

So, picture this concept being instantly added to the entirety of 10 years and 9+ million comments in the LGF archives retroactively, and I think it’s fair to say that Johnson just took a huge turd on his blog.

But for goodness sakes, why?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Johnsonian logic:

Forget about actually allowing…oh LMFAO…yep, it’s fixed!

And to top it off, the loozards actually thank him for this:

In the past, The Boiler Room Crew has provided accurate “signs of the LGF decline” statistics, including commenting rates, unique nic participation, individual nic stats, and karma levels. These things are relatively easy to glean, since the data is sitting right there in plain view on the site.  All one has to do is figure out a way to efficiently grab it and stick it into a spreadsheet, then activate the various filters for analysis (for the most part).

Featured previously: 1st time commenters

Now, I know we’ve noted it before, but the engineers of The Boiler Room thought we’d do a little more work to see just how poorly Johnson’s doing in another department: recruitment of new accounts (dubbed “hatchlings”). After all, this is a great gauge of the general popularity and community aspect of the blog (the site that was, not so long ago, a strong contender for “best online community”). In light of Johnson’s political 180° turn a few years ago, has he been able to attract a new base of lizards? Just how many folks are joining LGF in recent months/years, and how does that number compare to the old days?

For our purposes, this project was much more of a challenge.  Unlike the commenting stats, the info we needed isn’t in plain sight.  Sure, we could use an alternative method (see graph, left) to get a general idea, but that wasn’t giving us the true number. We thought that the info we needed was buried somewhere on the dashboard of the LGF blog engine, and virtually inaccessible to us, whether you’re logged in or not. What we discovered though, is that Johnson’s blog coding actually left the clues right under our noses, like unknowingly sailing over a shipwreck every day. (Some of the pieces we already had, and didn’t realize it!) Once the proverbial light bulb appeared, we grabbed as many strawberries as we could (over 2,500, as it turned out), and began to plug the figures in.  Even if not unexpected, our findings are a bit shocking…and not in a good way for Mr. @Lizardoid.

Background

First though, I’d like to quickly revisit a time back when Johnson was a wingnut, and registration windows were short. When the announcement came and they were opened, doors to the kingdom generally got busted. In those days, Johnson would usually follow up and tell everyone how successful it was (the following is a typical example, from July ’07):

Other info about registration was volunteered in the comment section by CJ in more popular days, as summarized by this gif montage:

But eventually, we assumed that the rate began to slow considerably, and as that happened, he just stopped talking about it.  In fact, the last time CJ even mentioned the word “hatchling” was in November of 2010  (article #37494), when we saw this:

(A “sock”, for those who aren’t familiar, is an account which has characteristics of belonging to someone who has previously registered under another nickname. These days, a large percentage of new accounts are socks).

That last hatchling count indicates quite a drop off from those previous examples, but to some may seem still somewhat respectable. Going forward, however, we didn’t have Johnson’s report to work with, so we were kinda out of luck. He’d post up an open registration thread, but wouldn’t leave any clue as to how many were joining.

To give a full visual of Johnson’s announcements over the years, everything was plotted, and Engineer No. 5 presents and explains the timeline of those open registration windows and hatchling counts (or lack thereof):

Chart #1 – Plot (black lines) of the final registration counts for announced registration openings. These windows were typically 30-60 minutes long.  The short red lines just mark when CJ announced an open registration, but failed to publish the count afterward –  his method of hiding the decline.

Indeed, over the last handful of windows of the timeline, Johnson was actively “selling” the benefits of an LGF account, in an attempt to attract newbies. But how can we calculate a recent hatchling rate, if CJ’s too embarrassed to tell us how many actually signed up? Hence, the need for that hidden data.

Results of the 2nd Great Strawberry Heist

Well, luckily we have some smart and resourceful people here in The Boiler Room, and those aforementioned strawberries can tell us everything.  For the time being, we’re going to refrain from explaining exactly how we got all this information*. But rest assured, because we have it, we can provide the following charts and analysis with confidence. It was only a matter of putting it all together. For that, we turn back to Engineer No. 5:

Chart #2 – A December calendar showing the open LGF registration windows… Green = Open, Gray = Closed (or unknown – I had a couple of glitches).   For the 40 days shown, registration was open for a total of at least 282 hours (11 days, 18 hours).

I highlighted the 3 week period that we have registration information for.  For that period, registration was open for at least 108 hours (4.5 days) during which CJ got at most 7 legit (non-sock) registrations.

Let’s extrapolate that one. Back then, an unannounced open registration snagged about 6 regs/hour, or 1 every 10 minutes.

Flash forward to 2011.  A 3 week series of unannounced open registrations snagged 7 legit regs in 108 hours, or 1 every 926 minutes.

_________________________________________________

Here’s where it gets really interesting.  The data we grabbed allows us to plot the registration activity at LGF over the years:

This is the new accounts/month timeline. Notice that there hasn’t been significant activity in quite some time.

This is the timeline for total registration counts. Notice the flattening line over the past few years.

Bottom line, if you take this data and average it out by year, this is what it looks like.

Analysis

Last we checked, there were 35,578 total user accounts registered since it was implemented in 2004 (we won’t mention how many are banned/blocked, as that is for another thread, and of course the number who are actively commenting these days is less than 1% of that). But check the “Grim Milestone” portion of the second graph: starting in mid-2007, the time to add the next 3,000 accounts keeps taking longer and longer, to the point where we really don’t know when (or if) they’ll get to the 36,000 mark.

Here’s a summary of the fun facts:

• LGF had about 1250 registrations during 18 hours on the first day it was open (6/15/2004).
• LGF has had about 1250 registrations during the 16 months from Sept 2010 and to the present.
• The number of new LGF registrations has decreased by at least 30% every year since 2007.
• The 4th year of decline, 2011, saw a whopping 67% fewer signups than 2010.
• During the period 2007-2011, the LGF registration rate declined by 92%.
• In 2007, open registrations typically netted 150-200 signups per hour.  (The “announced counts” chart confirms that.)
• In 2011, perpetually** open registration netted about 50 signups per month.

Conclusion

It’s no wonder why Charles now keeps unannounced registration open so often, tries to boost signups with occasional announced “sales pitch”, and doesn’t mention how many hatchlings he gets anymore. The takers are scarce these days.

What’s more, the accounts that do sign up are socks, with increasing likelihood.  Take the aforementioned 3 week span in December that we tracked as an example. There were a grand total of 11 accounts created, and we know that at least 4 of them were socks (which means that the real number could be much higher).

What’s not forgotten is the fact that the site currently has more bells and whistles than it ever has in the past: LGF spy, LGF Pages, auto-twitter updates, avatars, etc., plus at least one video posted per day… yet the rate still spirals.

We’ve hinted at it, but now we’re ready to confirm a date and time for the big reveal of our next project. After the Super Bowl, will you be watching “The Voice“, or will you tune in here to see what we’ve come up with? I’m going to recommend the latter (although, I suppose there’s nothing to stop you from doing both).

As a team, we’ve had some pretty neat projects in the past, like “Saint Pancake“, The Memory Hole rescues, the LGF comment stats, the “tweet counter” smackdown, the Johnson comment file, the jaw-dropping list of 4,200+ banned accounts, and the revelation that there are 32,531 duplicated comments in the LGF database (and that every “millionth” comment milestone ever celebrated over the years was premature), but this particular one is special.

Why? Well, in addition to the unprecedented collaborative effort within the BRC, this is the first time we’ve called on DoD readers to pitch in (we’ve had a great response on that, and we thank everyone who contributed). Also, while we’re sure that Johnson eventually discovered how we stole the memory-hole strawberries, we’re thinking that there’ll be some serious frustration-induced keyboard-mashing and ponytail stroking  over the question of how we got into his kitchen on this one. Remember that scene from Star Trek II where Kirk hacks into Kahn’s dashboard and lowers the Reliant‘s shields? Kinda like that (Kahn never did figure it out, right?).

We’ve got screencaps, animated gifs, charts, graphs, and analysis that will humble even the most sycophantic liz.

Anyway, there’s your teaser. Enjoy the game.

It appears that Johnson was tired of the look of his site again, and decided to fiddle around with a few things.  One of these things appears to be the font style for the main thread titles, and I noticed that I’m not the only one who thought they looked a little jacked:

Indeed, they are ragged.  But for a full forensic analysis, we’ll pull out another throbbing memo, so you can examine all the changes:

Notice anything weird? Like the “fi” in “Profile”. hmmm…let’s blow that up to 300%:

It looks like Charles invented a new letter for our alphabet. Another 300%:

OK, maybe he just didn’t experiment enough.  Ya think?  Let’s try…”fantasy”:

Cool.  OK, how about “tempus sans itc”:

For this particular thread, however, we’re going to go ahead and assume that CJ probably considers “wingdings” to be the best choice:

Last night, Walter gave us a snippet from his email inbox, and we were left to guess who the lizard author was.  Here’s the snip:

09-06-2010

Charles seems to be happy with this sort of “tag team” piling on by people like Jimmad, Ice and Ludwig (and with a little help from Darthstar). Then you have the cheerleading squad Floral Giraffe, SFZ, B_sharp and company. I mean, come on, when they are piling on McSpiff and Avanti, two of the more left liberals on LGF, something is wrong.

LGF is fast becoming a far left (as in progressive) echo chamber, with about 15-20 active far left posters, and that’s it. It’s his prerogative if he wants a progressive blog, fine, but he doesn’t even have anyway near the traffic to support it. Look at Daily Kos and Huffington Post as examples of busy left leaning blogs.

That’s what LGF has become, all because of Charles.

Charles brags about PAGE READS, PAGE HITS, but if you notice, he never brags about the actual USER count anymore, because he has ¾ the amount of active users as he did a year ago, even less if you compare threads to 2 or 3 years ago. And Charles knows this.

We allowed for plenty of time for visitors to enter their guesses, Walter has handed us the envelope, and we’re now ready to end this round. Ladies and gentlemen, “stalkers” and loozards, the author of the above quote is…

Read more…