BodyInflation.org

In a previous post, I looked into gender as it relates to inflation stories. This time around, I focus on the users.

There’s been much speculation about the gender ratio in the community. You can indicate gender in the current user profiles, but most haven’t. That’s not all that surprising; the feature’s only been there since 2011 and most accounts are older than that. But I do have about 1800 data points to deal with. That’s enough to have a bit of statistical fun.

First, the overall Gender breakdown:

Male: 79.6%
Female: 15.9%
Other: 4.5%

A long time ago, 12 years if the file timestamps are to be believed I was fiddling around a bit with making an inflation-themed text-based adventure game (or “interactive fiction” as it’s apparently called these days). I checked out the various development systems available at the time. I decided to see what I could do with TADS.

I recently noticed that the Library now has over a thousand stories in it. We actually hit that milestone back in January.

Congratulations to the community and thank you to all of the authors who have contributed over the years.

Of course I did what I usually due when presented with a large data set. I crunched some numbers.

Gender in Inflation Stories

One thing that completely blindsided me when I switched the site to Drupal was the spam problem. I never needed an anti-spam system when I used CPG-Nuke. It was rare enough that I could handle it manually.

Within a week of the site revamp, I was seeing about 50 fake user registrations per day. I installed the Mollom module for Drupal, and it's been a lifesaver. Yesterday it blocked over 700 spam attempts.