Influx of users during Xmas time

[Jenni Yumiko]

Seems last year and this year around this time there are always a massive amount of new introductions compared to 2nd 3rd quarter.
Is this true. If so why?

[Megan Thomas]

If so, I wonder how many are related to people getting dressed up for fancy dress parties at this time of year or maybe from Halloween?

[emilamb]

I'll admit that Halloween and then Christmas has had me thinking about dressing a lot more than before. With all the Halloween stuff out in stores, it occurred to me that I could buy things for "a costume" and not be questioned... and now with Christmas, I can buy things for "gifts" and not be questioned either! Or at least, I can pretend I'm not being questioned...

[Stephanie Miller]

Can't speak for a lot of girls, but I find I tend to spend more time indoors (therefore around the computer more) do to in-climate weather. But then again maybe because there are more sale fliers showing beautiful women and store sales that put it all out to the forefront of our thoughts more.

[DaphneMiller]

Speaking for myself, as a new member, I don't think the time of year had anything to do with it. I didn't dress up for Halloween, and won't be dressing up (to go out) over Christmas.

For me, I was just at that stage where I was starting to accept things, and it seemed a natural step. Does seem weird though.

Daphne

[revlonjennifer]

This is exactly the case for myself as well

[LauraOTN]

Several times in my life when I've been VERY stressed out, I've made the next leap in crossdressing. Like the when I first got into makeup. I don't know if it's just stress pushing me in some psychological way or simply when I get stressed enough to go "F* the world, I'll do what I want".

I'm also pretty much out to my friends, but not so much my family (Wife excepted).

I bet a lot of people get stressed out with a one-two punch of Plain Holliday Stress, and seeing their family while keeping secrets from them. I could see that driving traffic here.

Plus others taking a week off work or something gives them free time to indulge.

[LadyInRed]

for me it's something after my 40th, took a couple of months of thinking and looking on the net before I followed through

[Karren H]

I'd have to see the data and do some linear regressions to say whether that's a true statement or not.... Personally I thing that's there's probably a higher R squared correlation with people taking time off for the holidays and not being at work than to the the magnitude and frequency of new members dressing habits vs time....

[robindee36]

The curve is definitely skewed Karren. Certainly not a traditional bell curve (holiday jingle bells, giggles). Me thinks Bernoulli Bias could be causal but it may just be a seasonality factor. Not sure if this would be a binomial distribution, but my stats are a bit rusty.

If you are thinking of regression analysis, would the time of year be the independent variable and new members the dependent one? Just seem to have lost those memory engrams somewhere along the way. Definite causality - adult beverages.

Best wishes to all the PE's and laypersons for a happy and safe holiday season.

Hugs, Robin :bunny:

[Gillian Gigs]

Christmas can be a stressful time of the year. There are more suicides at this time of year also. It may be that the stress causes someone to dress as a way to relieve the tension. One other thing, it is easy to buy clothes for the wife at christmas, making it easier for a guy to get clothes for himself, what a convenient excuse. Duh, like who here didn't use that one at some point in the past!

As the english say, "in for a penny, in for a pound", so the next step is to join a group like this one.

[Beverley Sims]

Jenni,
Maybe people are on vacation, I know I was a couple of years ago.
I was traveling AMTRAK between Chicago and Seattle when I joined up.
I had plenty of time on my hands then.

[Jenni Yumiko]

Interesting, the stress issues seem plausible, was hoping Tamara could do a couple quick queries on member join dates by month through say 4 years to see if there are any correlations. I'm sure bulletin has a stats mod also

[Tallulah Rose]

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like dressing more in the winter. It's been the same way with me for years, not sure why.

[LaraPeterson]

I used a Bernoulli Bias once; but it fit too tight.

[Adriana Moretti]

I dress more in the summer....but spend more time on the comp in the winter.

[Krosstina]

I told myself this year that I would tell my wife so xmas was a perfect time to ask for something girly! She was'nt thrilled but is accepting. I also really didnt know a forum like this existed until I started asking questions about marriage and crossdressing on google.

[Edm_Jamie]

I recently joined and it was partly due to having extra time on hands over the holidays and finally getting around to joining after months of lurking.

[Tina_gm]

It also seems to be a time of a lot of reveal as well. I did, about a week before Christmas last year, err, I mean 2013 last year lol. It wasn't actually intended for that moment. I knew it was a discussion I had to have, but was going to wait until after Christmas. Somehow it all just ended up spilling out one night. But I do find that tis the season for a lot of reveal, and I wonder why that is.

[PaulaQ]

I bet a lot of people get stressed out with a one-two punch of Plain Holliday Stress, and seeing their family while keeping secrets from them. I could see that driving traffic here.


I believe this is a significant factor. There have been several others mentioned, but my experience is that gender dysphoria worsens during times of high stress. So it would be natural that holiday times would trigger many.

[Jillrox]

I had some extra time on my hands due to it being winter. Most of the warmer months I am busier with other activities. I was searching the web for a cd type forum , found this one and read some of the posts. I will say that I really did get a lot of good information ,then joined. I am feeling good about my new decision!

[bcpmax]

Data, data, data....
This question shall not go unanswered.
I wrote a program to get the day every member joined the forum, grouped them by year and month, then got the size of each. I made that data into a .csv file then used excel for analysis.

Admittedly, My data analysis skill are lacking (linear regression?), but I have spotted a jump in the number of new members in the months of March, July, October, and December.

If you wish to see for your self or do your own analysis I've attached the data as a csv formatted text document.

[Tamara Croft]

bcpmax, sorry but your data is completely wrong because you can't see the new members with a zero post count.

Just for example, so far Jan 2014 there are actually 66 new members, not 10 :)

[Jocelyn Quivers]

Now that I look my sign up date it was in December, go figure. No real reason why I just got tired of lurking/procrastinating and figured the "sky would not fall down, apocalypse, Ill be outted to the entire world doomsday scenario would happen if I joined." It was just coincidence that it was during the Xmas time.

[marci_x]

well, if you use me as an example, I had lots of time over the holiday's without working and more time on the internet
I'm just sayin

[DivineMissAmber]

Wow! There are some really smart people here. Statistics is way above my head. Maybe high intellegence and crossdressing are strongly correlated. :)

I just signed up but I don't think it really had to do with time of year. Just lucky, I guess?

[Eryn]

The data is interesting even if we must ignore the lurkers, I don't see a huge variation in signups. Summing the months for the years up to 2013 I find highs of 2036 in January and 1983 in October. Lows are 1707 in June and 1750 in November. The average monthly signup is 1862 with a standard deviation of 97. The extremes are within two standard deviations of the mean.

Here it is in graphical form:

217369

Just for fun, I summed the yearly signups:

2004- 477
2005- 1689
2006- 4436
2007- 2936
2008- 2601
2009- 2795
2010- 2072
2011- 1906
2012- 1847
2013- 1582

and, the graph:

217801

Now, that is a roller-coaster curve! I'd expect an initial burst of new signups, but after that the number of signups seem to have a downward slope rather than flattening out. Are the number of TG people dwindling, the need for support dwindling, or what?

[Jenni Yumiko]

That's interesting. Has this site been content searchable via the Internet the whole time?

[saramurphy]

Yup, tis the season for New Years Resolutions.
I am the person your post is about. I have not posted here in years and barley at all. I have already posted twice today because it is my resolution to get out of my closet.

[Tina B.]

Why not join in Dec or Jan, maybe people are just looking to start the new year with a new thing!

[marci_x]

I vote for the new years resolution!

[donnalee]

I think stress is a very large factor. Calls to suicide hotlines increase during the holidays, as those without family or few friends feel particularly isolated this time of year.

[Eryn]

If holiday stress is a part of it that might explain the peak in January, but what about the peak in October? Pre-Halloween jitters?

A more likely explanation is that some months have 3% more days than others (31 vs 30) and therefore 3% more opportunities to sign up. The only month where aggregate forum signups don't follow this pattern is May!

I'm still puzzled by the second graph. You'd think that with the recent greater acceptance of TGs there would be more people joining, not fewer.

[Jenni Yumiko]

Was the join process easier in 2006?
Ie. no captha, easily script spam able?

[Katie Oxford]

A couple of possible reasons suggest themselves immediately:

- Forums all over the interwebs are in decline. This place is in much healthier shape than many that used to be bustling, perhaps because it isn't so easy for its traffic to slip onto Facebook, but I could easily believe that the same effect applies here as elsewhere.

- When the forum was set up, that was the opening up of the chance for everyone then of an age to use it to discover it. Effectively, three generations worth of people were given the opportunity to sign up all at once. Now, each new year brings only one year's worth of sign-ups. I'd expect the graph to gradually settle on a more or less constant level of new member sign-ups after a number more years; let's check back in the year 2025...

[Karren H]

Personally I think its due to excessive singing of "Deck the Halls".... after repeating "don we now our gay apparel" 50 times.... boom..... sign up for CD.Com....

[SherriePall]

The totals could be dropping due to the number of us out there. After the great surge of 06, there are fewer left to come aboard. The sign-ups now could be those coming of age who find this site, thus the smaller totals each year. Kind of a saturated market type of thing.

[heymj]

What an interesting thread, I'm one of those that joined up in Dec and I'm afraid that the answer for me is quite simply "time" it's the only time of the year when I'm not training for races / working hard and have some space to relax, reflect and indulge my passion for cross dressing. Outside that I'm very intrigued by the stress and cross dressing relationship, interesting to hear that others feel like cross dressing is a stress reliever, it certainly is for me, a chance to escape my day to day identity and to look and feel different :-)