Is your forum still as good as when you first launched it? Does it still have the same number of users signing up to it that it did in the beginning? Is it getting more popular as time goes on? You can find out how many people have signed up to your forum over it’s lifetime with a single line of SQL.

Open a connection to your database using MySQL Query Browser, phpMyAdmin or whatever database management app your’re using and issue the following statement:

SELECT MONTH( FROM_UNIXTIME(user_regdate) ) AS Month,
YEAR( FROM_UNIXTIME(user_regdate) ) AS Year,
COUNT( * ) AS Total FROM phpbb_users GROUP BY Year, Month

making sure to replace “phpbb_” with your table prefix if you haven’t used the default.

This query works by creating Month and Year fields based on the user registration date for all the rows in your query. We can then group the records by Year, and then Month, in ascending order and the COUNT(*) clause will add up all the rows in your users table for each Year / Month combination. What you get is a chronological list of months, showing you how many users signed up in each month.