A few stats that may be of some passing interest:
I looked at the first 200 members listed alphabetically, and found:
92 of those 200 have signed in at least once in 2012. (46%). Some percentage of those only once, right around the date they registered.
46 of the 92 (50%, or 23% of the total) have posted at least once at some point since they registered. (Not necessarily posted in 2012, just at least once since they've registered).
So, if those percentages hold up for the entire set of 2000, that would suggest that
around 920 of our 2000 members have logged in at least once in 2012. (It's lower if you discount the ones who logged in only once, on the date they registered).
around 460 of those 920 have posted at least once at some point since they registered.
All in all, that's a pretty high level of participation. Keep in mind that it'd be overstating it a bit to say we've got 460 "actively participating members". That'd be around 23% of the total that ever registered. But to find "actively participating members", you'd probably want to discount people who signed in only once (on the date they registered), and you'd probably also want to adjust the numbers for the recent growth curve (which appears to have steepened in the past 12 months). And further, you'd probably want to use a window of less than 10 months (we're about 10 months into 2012 already)... ESPECIALLY since such a high percentage of the 2000 have actually first registered within that 10 month window. A 2 or 3 month window probably makes more sense to figure out "active" participation.
It'd take more analysis to really estimate the number/percentage that you'd want to consider "actively participating". But if you estimate that at still around 15 - 20%, that's really a VERY HIGH percentage of members participating. The numbers I found in this little exercise are considerably higher than I was expecting to find... usually for hobbyist membership sites the number active is more like 5 - 8%. I guess fig fanatics really are dedicated! (at least comparatively).
Mike central NY state, zone 5
p.s. We also seem to have a good number of unregistered "viewers". I don't have the web traffic logs to do any analysis of that, looking for repeat IP's or anything like that, but just from the informal data that Jon shows at the bottom of the forums listing page, it usually appears that there are quite a few unregistered people visiting the site (maybe 4 to 1 on average?). Some number of those people are undoubtedly repeat visitors too... part of the "active readers" category.