In my experience, internet forums tend to have many times as many lurkers as posters. Also, it’s a bit tricky to take all the “noise” out of the data, as you’re suggesting, and another thing to add to the list of noisemakers are the search engine crawling robots. They don’t all use the term “robot” in their user agents, and anybody can build a robot, so it’s hard to filter them all out.
In my experience, internet forums tend to have many times as many lurkers as posters. Also, it’s a bit tricky to take all the “noise” out of the data, as you’re suggesting, and another thing to add to the list of noisemakers are the search engine crawling robots. They don’t all use the term “robot” in their user agents, and anybody can build a robot, so it’s hard to filter them all out.