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)

Last month during Walter’s infamous Email Dump a lot of lizards got jumpy and nervous, and a comment caught our eye. It reasserts what many of us have suspected and speculated upon for a long time.
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Is that proof of a backstabbing cabal on the Little Putting Green of the Blogosphere? No, it’s just hearsay, at least so far. The person who wrote the comment declined to divulge his source in order to protect the privacy of that source, who is apparently a lizard in good standing. We respect that.

The lizards claim they don’t read here, but it sure seems like they do, because a few days later we noticed this:

Jimmah didn’t quite report it correctly, but she and her husband iceweasel spotted it for sure. Does that disprove the allegations? Nope. And we don’t care.

We don’t care because we like proof. Meanwhile, we received some unrelated Twitter messages today from a lizard, meant for another lizard, that was sent to us by accident. Shit happens, and we won’t divulge that lizard’s nic either.

[somewhat NSFW audio]

Just in case the vid goes Johnson, we preserved the important part.

[Update: They don't read here, but we back up vids, too. Here it is.]

Jimmah and asswhistle don’t undermine other lizards, huh.

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Bonus: Note the single comment below the vid:
“LOL. What did he do now?”
Neddhartha is none other than Cato The Elder (who summoned his own banning months before by refusing to hit the Tip Jar). He also left this chewy little morsel for Charles on the Little Green Footballs Kindle subscription page:

[h/t Bagua & BRC Engineer No. 6]

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)

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.

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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:

“In Defense Of Charles Johnson” is a phrase I never thought I’d utter.

One of the recurring themes at Little Green Footballs has to do with threats Charles has received over the years. The few examples he’s posted are dopey emails of the “You Are A Poopee Weenie Head” type. Most of us snickered at the supposed death threats that he mentions from time to time yet he’s never posted anything to back up his claim.

It turns out that Charles’ claims may have some legitimacy. (Look at that ————>
but don’t click on it yet. We’ll tell you when.)

First, let’s discuss the term “stalker.” In Charles Johnson/LGF terms, stalkers are evil obsessed bottom-dwellers who have no conscience and live solely to make the “stalkees” miserable and paranoid by reading a blog they dislike and commenting on its false importance and ongoing inanity. That describes The Boiler Room Crew pretty well (except for the part of stalking that involves forcefully striking a BRC Engineer squarely between the shoulder blades to dislodge the foosball he swallowed while washing it).

The real world definition of “stalking” is a bit more brutal than coughing up unwashed foosballs. BRC Engineer No. 8 discovered and forwarded a cache link that we won’t post here. There are some very nasty types out there who really hate Charles Johnson, at least they did in April 2008. Here are two snippets, with personal information blacked out.

We have no problem confirming that one of the commenters on that thread from 26 April 2008 was this guy. What a piece of neonazi shit, as if there were any other kind. Now go back up to that funny little bar at top right and click on it to read the entire thread if you want.

The people on that forum are dangerous nasty, and if anyone from LGF is lurking here, including you, Charles, rest assured that The BRC won’t play that game. Never have, never will. This blog is intended for fun childish mockery only. Now go piss up a rope.

Last evening, on what was otherwise a very typical LGF open thread, the Grand Lizardoid got that tingle.  Sure enough, after checking his referrer page, he found that someone outside of our little  circle was checking them out:

OMG!  An LGF Page!  Nobody reads those!  But sure enough, the various fake counters on the page were rising, rapidly.  Gus felt so proud:

Wow, now aren’t you glad you didn’t quit, Gus?

Again, they aren’t “tweets”.

In any case, as I type, the page in question is now up to 1290 on the “counter”.  But did it set a record?  Johnson didn’t respond because, well, not quite yet:

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Update update.

As I write, the latest from the swamp of CJ’s LGF:

Hmmm…an “instant classic”, eh? The BRC is certainly suited to check into Johnson’s track record for calling this, and gosh darnit, we should. I mean, with >39K threads, we must have seen teh Johnson’s keen insight on this type of thing before, right?

Well…if you use the regular LGF search for “instant classic”, guess what? Nothing but the above thread turns up. Even The World’s Greatest Blog Search Engine™ came up empty in the comments section…

But I could have sworn that CJ has thrown this out there before.  Could’ve sworn, I say.  But gee-whiz and golly…where?  And when?

Hmmm…

Read more…