While it's natural to try to speculate as to what might be causing these losses, I think it's a mistake to just come up with explanations that don't have any factual basis and casually dismiss them.

Granted that jonnie's figures include people who likely left because of the closing of the XRP giveaway and there's no doubt that a large number of them were in the top 5000. But the fact remains that as if I sort BOINCstats by total points and look at the names then look at current points, I see a lot of familiar names with zeros in that column.

So while jonnie's figures may be skewed by the giveaway, you only need to look at the user overview charts here to see that the growth in the total number of users has been increasing at a decreasing rate - http://boincstats.com/en/stats/15/project/detail/user

The only exception is the period of the the XRP giveaway.

If you're looking at the active user chart, I suppose that can be explained by the fact that most users are in the northern hemishpere. However even that doesn't really make much sense to me since the average user is running BOINC on their primary computer and shouldn't even be noticing the difference. So what you're really saying is that thousands of WCG'ers have been shutting down ALL of their crunchers for the summer time - even their Android phones. That doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.

But as has been pointed out above, the only way to really get any answers is to contact these people and send them a short questionnaire to try to find out what caused them to abandon WCG. Is it permanent or temporary. Was it something personal that WCG had no control over something about the software, website, forum or quality of support?

We need to ask questions in order to get answers and honestly I don't see our crack staff here getting on that anytime soon.

To clarify:
As of Apr 4 (when I last looked just as Ripple was starting to wind down from peak) only 371 of the top 5,000 users were members of the Ripple Labs Team.

More importantly in the context of this discussion, of the 700 InActive users cited in my OP just 20 were/are members of Ripple Labs.

I registered with WCG in 2004 and stopped contributing for a period of time (about 3 months) to try something else. WCG got stale for me. Same 3 projects, same WU names, day after day after day for years. it's mundane. I just wanted to see something different for a while. There used to be new projects that came on about every 18 months or so that broke up the monotony. Once you reach the 10 to 50 year badges, it takes a long time to the next one. Nothing to make it interesting. I came back because it was like that just about everywhere else once the new wears off. The nature of Distributed Computing I guess.

Thanks for clearing that up jonnie. I guess that puts an even finer point on the loss of people who have made major contributions here. But do we expect any of the staff to even acknowledge this issue? ROFLMAOBBQ.

I'm really quite shocked at the retention rate of the Ripple Labs team. I was pretty much convinced that the vast majority of these people where renting cloud cpu cycles and would evaporate like the morning dew once the XRPs dried up. I guess that serves to highlight the value of speculation.

I'm quite tickled to be dead wrong about that. But once again, like a fresh coat of paint over rotting wood, it only serves to mask the issue Scribe has raised.

Doneske: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the low project count. The staff's view on this is that it doesn't matter as long as there is enough work to go around. Clearly, they are once again WRONG!!!

I hate seeing this over and over again (not Twilyth in particular). Correct me if I am wrong, but the WCG staff don't generate the projects, the projects need to be proposed by the scientists which means they need to go to WCG. Rather than bite the hand that feeds you, maybe we can find ways to bring more scientists to WCG?

Back on topic. I don't know if people are actively leaving WCG or not. Ripple was a blip and some people actively chased the money though cloud computing etc. After that, they dropped out for electricity costs but some stayed and are in the community, which is great.

However, the nature of the WCG/BOINC software is that it is an install and forget piece of software. Over the years, I've installed it on over 200 pcs all over the world and I have quite a few that have stopped producing. A small percentage are those where the owners have removed them.

However, the vast majority have not removed it. Why they aren't producing, is perhaps because

1) It has just stopped working and they haven't noticed. Could be stuck WUs or something. Program error etc.

2) Internet settings changed and so no upload/download

3) They've retired the computer

4) Clean install of OS.

What I am getting at is that although people will join WCG, they forget about it and when it fails, they don't notice it and fix it.
We are a bunch of people who monitor WCG constantly, but I think we are in a small minority.