Hanukkah Head Count

Notes (in no particular order)

• 10% and 20% Active is calculated from the Membership number, to give the reader an idea as to how many people we're talking about if 10% or 20% of the membership of each forum is active on the forum. This is based on observations that only a small portion of a forum members are active at any given time, and by active I mean that they actually say something, and don't just lurk. The "active" members as defined by the vBulletin forum software means only that someone logged into their account in the last 30 (or 45?) days, not that they actually did anything.

• For comparison's sake, Table 5 presents membership and vBulletin's count of "active" members, for a number of sites which display this information, including a couple of deceased Arabic forums, and the still active Minbar-SOS (French), Takva (Turkish), and IslamicAwakening (English) forums.

• Forum Code is an arbitrary letter or number assigned to sites to prevent the clueless from using this data as a method for choosing which forums to attack.

• Membership is total membership in the forum, as measured and displayed by the vBulletin software on the index page of each site.

• Data collection has been on-going since the beginning of 2006, when anything resembling "Internet Haganah" type activity actually ceased, and I began focusing almost exclusively on data collection and analysis. On a somewhat related note, most information on the Internet related to my activities is at least three years old, and was largely inaccurate even then.

• Percentage Change is (end value - start value)/start value. Percentage change and membership data is presented for sites b and c, which were two of the main victims of the September 11, 2008 meltdown. See Table 4.

• The sites are from my Top Ten list of jihadi forums, which I no longer publish as a result of the actions of the aforementioned clueless ones (see note above about Forum Code). This list includes a range of established and up-and-coming sites. I have pretty good taste in really bad sites, if I do say so myself.

• The overall percentage change in membership of -53% between 2007 and 2008 is most likely related to established sites having an increasing number of inactive users as each year passes. In other words, as new people join, the number of members increases, but as they drop out the number of members does not automatically decrease - the site administrators must go out of their way to remove inactive users from the database. So when sites b and c died, their active members migrated elsewhere, while their inactive members, being inactive, didn't migrate anywhere. In short, we got rid of a whole lot of dead wood with the demise of the "Big Four" in September of 2008. Perhaps the overall population of jihadis online has also declined, and maybe that's because of the defeat of the jihad in Iraq, but I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet.

• The decrease in membership seen in sites 2 and 8 is most likely the result of both sites being first offline or largely inactive during the period in question, followed by a purging of inactive site members by the administrators, a task which the vBulletin control panel makes pretty easy.

• The dramatic increase in membership from 2006 to 2007 in site 4 is the result of my getting in early, when the site only had two dozen members. The 311% gain in memberships for that site from 2007 to 2008 is more inline with the natural growth of an increasingly important site, but was also the result of the site administrators making it easier to join after many important sites were shut down for a time in August-September of 2007.

• The collection of data around Hanukkah is arbitrary - I just happened to realize this morning that I have data from this period going back three years, so why not take a look? Note though that in both 2007 and 2008 there were major removals of forums around September - call it a culling of the herd. So we are looking at how the jihadi community online responds to such an event. It's probably too early to say anything conclusive, but my feeling is that the jihadis are getting more resilient, and are recovering better and more quickly than they did in '07.

Table 1.

Hanukkah Head Count 2008
Forum Code	Membership	10% Active	20% Active	% Change From 2007
1	481	48.1	96.2	NA
2	3056	305.6	611.2	-47%
3	9778	977.8	1955.6	95%
4	13226	1322.6	2645.2	311%
5	797	79.7	159.4	NA
6	5155	515.5	1031	NA
7	2505	250.5	501	307%
8	1576	157.6	315.2	-77%
9	624	62.4	124.8	NA
10	6298	629.8	1259.6	145%
Total	43496	4349.6	8699.2	-53%

Table 2.

Hanukkah Head Count 2007
Forum Code	Membership	10% Active	20% Active	% Change From 2006
3	5014	501.4	1002.8	NA
b	10605	1060.5	2121	3%
c	40288	4028.8	8057.6	125%
4	3220	322	644	13317%
j	11097	1109.7	2219.4	NA
m	5803	580.3	1160.6	21%
7	615	61.5	123	NA
8	6763	676.3	1352.6	311%
2	5745	574.5	1149	NA
10	2568	256.8	513.6	NA
Total	91718	9171.8	18343.6	24%

Table 3.

Hanukkah Head Count 2006
Forum Code	Membership	10% Active	20% Active
i	4839	483.9	967.8
b	10323	1032.3	2064.6
c	17910	1791	3582
j	10139	1013.9	2027.8
l	3360	336	672
4	24	2.4	4.8
h	14508	1450.8	2901.6
8	2743	274.3	548.6
g	5171	517.1	1034.2
m	4782	478.2	956.4
Total	73799	7379.9	14759.8

Table 4.

Head Count - pre-9/11 2008 melt down
Forum Code	Membership	10% active	20% active	% Change
c	56682	5668.2	11336.4	41%
b	11763	1176.3	2352.6	11%

Table 5.

Members and "Active" Members 2008
Forum	Membership	"Active"	% "Active"
Takva	3952	676	17.11%
IslamicAwakening	4541	674	14.84%
al-Nusra	5171	1105	21.37%
Abu al-Bokhary	4839	333	6.88%
al-Boraq	10139	2248	22.17%

Posted on 20 December 2008 @ 10:31