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Stack Overflow has just surpassed 1000000 users user ids. Yet if you go to the /users page, there are "only" 15655 pages. 36 users a page, that's "only" 563,580 users.

Since unregistered users also have their unique ids but don't show up in the /users pages, I'll assume there is difference there. But are about half of our members unregistered?

And there are users who are outright deleted. What gives? Does SO purge its users after some period of inactivity?

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  • I think they only show users with either at least 50 or 100 rep.
    – Caffeinated
    Oct 17, 2011 at 23:24
  • 9
    @Adel Clearly that's not the case. If you go to the last page, you'll see users with 1 rep.
    – NullUserException อ_อ
    Oct 17, 2011 at 23:25
  • User ID 4637897 created around now.
    – bjb568
    Mar 5, 2015 at 17:50
  • See also a question on activity meta.stackexchange.com/questions/269334/…
    – Nemo
    Nov 13, 2015 at 14:24
  • Are there also stats for the whole StackExchange/all sites of the SE network?
    – rugk
    Sep 29, 2018 at 23:11

4 Answers 4

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29 
Select Count(*) From Users

Stack Overflow has 829,905 users at the moment (a few more by the time I submit this), then take away one for Community, here's a breakdown:

  • Registered: 564,682
  • Unregistered: 265,189
  • Moderator: 32

And there are users who are outright deleted. What gives?

We deal with spam like everyone else...and users who ask to have their accounts deleted.

Does SO purge its users after some period of inactivity?

Yes, an automated task cleans out accounts with literally no activity after a certain age.

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  • 2
    Very few moderators
    – Tadas V
    Nov 5, 2014 at 20:47
  • 1
    can this answer be updated please, currently 4,879,230 from the query explorer.
    – Rabea
    Nov 23, 2015 at 15:46
  • 1
    What is this query explorer? Can you please share the details.
    – Aniket Thakur
    Dec 19, 2015 at 14:29
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    @AniketThakur , I think that he talks about this data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new
    – ROMANIA_engineer
    Dec 20, 2015 at 0:11
  • 08/10/2016: 5892453. This number grows very fast.
    – RandyTek
    Aug 10, 2016 at 21:15
  • 2
    Isn't purging users dangerous? What if somebody wants their account back?
    – Alec
    May 22, 2019 at 6:06
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First off, unregistered (cookie-based) accounts don't show up on the users page. So there's a big chunk of users who won't "count".

Then, accounts are deleted automatically if they aren't active. (See link and blog post for definition of "active"). So those won't show up either.

Finally, there are accounts that are merged, and accounts that are simply deleted for other reasons (user asked for account to be deleted, spammer accounts, etc.)

See also

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  • 6
    Additionally, going to stackexchange.com/sites will show a count of registered and unregistered users per site.
    – Mat
    Oct 18, 2011 at 5:44
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You can use Stack Exchange Data Explorer to check how many users Stack Overflow has.

Here is a sample query:

select count(u.Id) as "total users", sum(u.UpVotes) as "total upvotes", sum(u.DownVotes) as "total downvotes" FROM Users u

Results:

  • Apr 18 '20: 12162499
  • Aug 12 '19: ~10m (more accurately, 10843066)
  • Nov 23 '15: ~4.9m
  • Nov 11 '14: ~3.5m
  • Oct 18 '11: ~800k (as per Nick answer)
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If you are interested in the exact and most up to date value you can get if from Stack Exchange API:

https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users?&site=stackoverflow&filter=total

Or go to https://sostats.github.io and see the latest metrics:

sostats - total number of users

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