An open letter from isselman2000 upon reaching "500" members

So how many people are in -=[CDS]=-, really? Well, let's count them. But what are we counting exactly? I can tell you right now that the number of members we have across all seven of our groups is 673. But a large percentage of our members occupy more than one group. So that number doesn't help us very much. I think we can more or less agree we're looking for the number of UNIQUE members in the clan. The easiest calculation we can do gives us a result of 501 members. That is, we can take the highest numbered recruit from group 7 (492) and add the nine "pre-recruit" members (1st Sergeant, 2nd Lieutenant, and so forth) from group 1. But this number isn’t exactly accurate, either. There are a few members who have quit the community, and, since we were updating the lists by hand, we could not, in any practical sense, remove them from the roster each time this happened (as it would mean practically redoing the whole list every time). Indeed, the roster could be used as an approximation of the number of players who have APPLIED. But we are more concerned with the number of players who are actually presently in the clan. The best method I have found for achieving this end is to take the member list from each group (this one is actively and automatically updated – it is the one where you have the option to kick a player from your group) and copy it into a Word document. Then select to automatically sort the data into alphabetical order (an option in MS Word 2007), manually remove the names that appear more than once (this is easy, since all the names are grouped together alphabetically), and have Word do a line count for you. With this method, I can say that the closest approximation I have been able to achieve is around 476 members.

    

So we can say with some certainty that there are more or less 476 unique player profiles (give or take a couple, allowing for human error) currently signed up for one of the main seven groups in the clan. Finding the actual number of unique people in the clan would be a far more difficult, if not impossible endeavor.