I honestly wonder how many people join Cemetech to ask a question or two, then leave never to be heard from again.
Has anyone else noticed that?

Not me, ha ha.

Totally me.

Well, that's to be expected. The only way to reduce that number is to make the community less findable, really.

Yes, it is quite interesting how many people never show up again. Where do they go...

They go home and cry about not being members of such an awesome community.

MC Clap-yo-Handz. Probably

Not active members, strictly speaking.
I wonder how much impact their short time here has impacted them, if at all...

Well, hopefully they learned a little something here and there.

Some people are not necessarily interested in participating in online calculator forums so they only use them when they need help.

http://www.ti-84-plus.com/calculatorquestions/

for a single question or two, this is better, I feel. however, we should encourage people to stay in the community as much as possible, if only so that they can give us feedback about projects and what they would like to see.

^this and also, it might be that some people are intimitated when they see how long some members have been around.

it would probably be a little better if there was something when you register that makes you really think about joining ex. a dollar. I'm not recommend this, but it would "weed out" people that would join and leave a few days after.

I'm not sure that is what we want at cemetech. I'm going to go ahead and say that that would scare away some potential members, too, usually those who are still dabbling with coding the device.

I agree. Why pay for something when you can have it for free?

And yet you brought us the first news of the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and (I think) brought us to the center of TI's attention from what I've heard. That sounds like a valuable contribution to me. Anyway, I think the underlying question is "What can we do to make new members come back more often?". I think the answer is multifaceted. First, we need to make sure we continue to offer prompt, helpful, friendly answers (and of course gentle corrections when people use bad grammar or bad netiquette). I think we already do a pretty good job of that. Second, I think we need to make sure that new visitors are aware of the breadth of our focuses. For example, I think most people understand that we focus on calculators, but don't stick around to ask computer programming or DIY electronics questions unless they were already here for a while doing calculator programming. Does anyone have some suggestions on how we could do that better?

Perhaps we could have a "landing page" which comes up as soon as new members register and explains what we do at cemetech (the programming side, the DIY electronics side, the flagship projects, UT and minecraft).

This sounds like a good idea. Perhaps there could even be completely separate pages for looking at these forums, and collecting them all together. For example, rather than having each topic under the Forums menu, make different sections for particular focus.

If we do use a "Landing Page", then I suggest that it NOT turn out like the one over at http://www.ti-84-plus.com, which is rather static, boring, and doesn't notify the users that it is a community site. If I weren't one of the few members over there, I would say that it was an ad-stub.

Something I have noticed with the "Introduce Yourself", people mainly say "hello there, I'm so-and-so, I have such-and-such-calc(s), I do such-and-such-programming, so Hi." is there any way we can add another criteria to this forum? Like, what do you hope to accomplish or something like that. It may help jump-start conversation and get them more involved.