I think you answered your own question by citing how you download -- you can't. If there is no login requirement and no way to identify a unique "person," it is not possible to obtain the metric accurately.

This is why it's important to look at adoption versus any individual metric such as registrations, downloads, forum posts etc.

Nik

John, that's not quite true. Apparently I'm the top moderator here so perhaps my view is skewed, but so far today I have deleted more than a dozen posts that either contained spam or cross-site scripting attempts (In addition I've deleted another handful of duplicates and moved some posts that users attempted to post into the updates forum)  IMHO if we did not have a moderation queue the spam attempts would grow exponentially becuase of the size of the community and an attempt to piggyback on our high google pagerank.

>> I also believe that the participation here is severly stiffled because of the moderation imposed. 

I do not believe that participation is "stiffled" (sic) because of the moderation imposed. Either way, there is no factual basis to prove or disprove the premise. The only way to do it would be to turn off moderation and that is not going to happen.

>> The main argument from those in control is that they do not want spam in the forums.

That is not the main argument, it is merely a goal which appears to have been achieved on an ongoing basis since most spam is moderated out. Spam in the general sense is not the only problem moderation addresses. There are posts made to the wrong forum, posts with excessive commercial messaging, posts that are not in accordance with the forums guidelines, posts that cross the line of civil conversation, posts that are disruptive to the community...the list goes on. For any online community forums with a large number of members, there has to be a filter to ensure that chaos does not ensue. The site quoted earlier is a great example. Dpreview.com does not have moderation, but it has a pretty good up-front filter...you cannot register with a public email address (i.e. you must have a private domain email or ISP email). This is an up-front deterrent as anonymity is no longer guaranteed.

Different communities choose different ways to protect their community forums. We have chosen moderation because it's effective and works for these forums.

Nik