ConwayLife.com

I saw the thread about welcoming newcomers and it nudged me into asking something adjacent.

Outside of Life I help run the chat server for a small procedural generation and simulation group, a few thousand people, and the thing I cannot get right is recognising the members who actually bring newcomers in and then look after them. It feels relevant here because this place has the same pattern: a handful of regulars answer almost every beginner question, on the wiki and in the Discord, year after year, and nobody keeps score.

In my group we could not even measure it at first. The counters we had credited whoever's link was used last, and they counted every account that joined and disappeared within the week. Once we started using a decent invite tracker that threw out the brand new accounts and removed anyone who left, the ordering was completely different from what the mods had assumed.

So two questions for people who have been around here far longer than me. Does this community have any notion of who brings people in, formal or otherwise? And is keeping score on that a good idea at all, or does measuring it change the thing you were trying to measure?

We don't really try to being newcomers in. Anyone who comes in more likely than not just stumbled upon CGoL and/or other CAs.

We certainly need enough newcomers to replace the steady erosion of community members who drift away for various reasons. So we do have discussions now and again about how best to expand the community.

More newcomers isn't always automatically better, of course. If we used our current standard "trust automatically on request" method to quickly add a thousand or even a hundred newcomers to the LifeWiki, for example, most likely there would suddenly be too much review work for the current set of experienced LifeWiki editors to keep up with.

Too many newcomers on the forums at once also strains the community's collective resources -- e.g., moderators' time for dealing with post reports, or friendly community members' time writing welcome messages and explaining how the forum rules work. So if we're going to grow, it seems better to grow gradually, so that the moderator and community-welcomer pools can grow in step with the total community size.

Ideally we hope for a steady trickle of new contributors with interesting ideas, who will keep on extending the frontiers of CGoL and OCA research. So far it certainly doesn't seem like there's any end to those frontiers; the more we explore the more we find.

I occasionally do minor ad-hoc explorations to try to measure the number of people "out there" who have come across Conway's Life at some point, have been fascinated by it for a while, but who maybe have never heard of conwaylife.com or the LifeWiki. My sense is that that pool is rather large -- hundreds of thousands of people, probably many millions. There are a lot of hackers out there -- in the old creative-programmer sense, not the cybercriminal sense.

So I do think there's a lot of room for advertising the community better, just by doing a better job of broadcasting the fascinating stories of various recent discoveries and collaborations, many of which are really quite impressive. If someone is interested in those stories, the we definitely want them to know that the LifeWiki and the forums are here waiting to be explored.

IsaacM35 wrote: September 11th, 2026, 11:00 am So two questions for people who have been around here far longer than me. Does this community have any notion of who brings people in, formal or otherwise? And is keeping score on that a good idea at all, or does measuring it change the thing you were trying to measure?

It doesn't seem like anyone tries to track that, no. The closest thread is how and when you discovered the game of life?, but that's actually distinct from "how did you discover conwaylife.com?" Someone could certainly create a thread like that, I would think -- might be interesting to get a sampling of discovery stories from whoever wanted to write them.

But if we were somehow trying to "keep score", we'd probably have to figure out how to give more points to recruiters of newcomers-who-contribute-amazing-things, and not so many to recruiters of newcomers-who-make-noise-and-then-leave. It seems rather unlikely that we could figure out how to make judgments like that reliably and consistently, without doing subtle but significant damage to the community -- so probably we won't ever attempt to collect that particular metric!