2007-01-14

Skype Forum growth

On December 31 the Skype Forum had registered more then 140.000 usernames since it started officially on September 25, 2003.

The growth of Forum users is still exponential. The increase of users has now reached a speed of 300 new users per day, as shown on the “cleaned” graph below.

Why cleaned? I eliminated data concerning some known SpamBots, as mentioned in my posts of August, 2006 and confirmed by Jaanus, the main Skype Blogger, in his personal blog.

The growth of Forum users certainly is another indication that Skype is growing.

However, there is also a “bad side” on the forum growth story. Quite a lot of people go to the forum because they have some technical question, technical problems or to make a complaint.

There are 8 main topics on the English part of the forum, and in each “last” topic post, i looked at the title. At 17h00 GMT+1 yesterday (when preparing this post) 5 were complaints (“choppy sound”, “DUPED”, “Charged twice”, “Problems”, “no word from Skype”) one was written in български and i didn’t understand, one was a suggestion (“Skype needs add fax function”), and one was information (“Article for Skype Plugin”).

What i want to suggest with this, is that high forum growth indeed means Skype growth but could also mean “more complaints” of the Skype user base. The good thing about the Forum: besides the volunteers, several Skype Staff people read it, answer questions or solve problems.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

български means Bulgarian.
This is the main topic where we answer questions about Skype in Bulgarian.
Initialy this topic was created for discussing the Bulgarian translations.
There are complaints of course, but the mainstream is quite positive.

Jean Mercier said...

Nikolay,

Thanks for the other readers, but i knew what it means because i read the alphabet: "bulgarski".

But i don't speak, neither Bulgarian, nor Russian! ;-)

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