I took another stab at the graph, this time using only members that have a book in their inventory instead of total members. I think this should take care of the inactive accounts, but it incorrectly excludes active members that do not have a book listed. Still not perfect, but maybe a little bit better.

Your point #4 is a good counter-point to my hunch and is further confirmed by the additional line I added to the new graph: number of mooches per 100 members has been rising steadily since 2006. The community is clearly growing and users are becoming more active moochers as time goes on.

I’m looking forward to watching the site grow and evolve in the future. Thanks for listening to a fan calling out ideas from the bleachers

1) there are a lot of abandoned accounts, and their points are shown in the reports, but the points they’ve abandoned have effectively been removed from the system. One way to calculate that is to remove accounts on “vacation” from your numbers, as unresponsive users (probably abandoned) are automatically put on vacation. Their points remain, but the books are removed, which further accentuates your trends.

2) I’m interested by your two “bleed off” ideas, especially intriguing is your extra-point-for-wishlisted-books idea.

3) people will always feel that they have more points than they can spend, simply by virtue that most users come to bookmooch with years of accumulated books-they-want-to-get-rid-of, and the points those years of books will generate will naturally themselves take years to spend.

4) as a counter-trend to the “I can’t find what I’m looking for”, the number of mooches per day continues to increase, at about 2475 books mooched per day in the past week, while 6 months ago that number was 1915 books mooched per day.

I really do appreciate your writing about inflation, as it is high up in my mind of issues to watch, and your solutions show an appreciation for the BookMooch Culture, which makes them quite relevant to think about.

- john