This is an issue which comes up frequently, especially when there is any sort of change which emphasises the difference between new or infrequent posters and older more frequent posters. Most recently it came up with the new reputation bar. This whole debate is based on people's subjective impressions. Those are important, of course, but people here seem to have very different impressions of how open E-I is. So I thought it would be good to have some numbers. Those of you who don't like numbers, stop reading now.

There are 22,917 registered members, with a total of 214,949 posts.
The top 100 posters account for 117,055 of those posts, or 54.4%.
The other 22,817 members account for the remaining 45.6%.
On average, the top posters have 1,170 posts.
The others have 4 posts, on average.

Of the posts from the top 100 posters, the authors of those posts are
00.4% Agencies
05.9% E-I Staff (including Patricia)
19.2% Escorts (current or former)
26.1% Moderators (current only, including czars and such)
48.4% Other members (mostly clients)

It would be nice to have some historical numbers, to know whether E-I is becoming more of a closed community, but unfortunately those would be very difficult to compile.

I've just given the numbers. It's up to you to interpret them. What do you think?