NationStates Jolt Archive

That's what it says on the main page (when you're not logged in). Though in "The World" there are currently "only" 131,492 nations. Where's the number on the main page from? All nations ever created (and later abandoned/banned)?

Many, many nations are gone. Either deleted because of violations (relative small amount) and the rest are going because inactivity. This site went up in Nov 2002, many people have left but many came as well.

lets not forget, people who have 5 or 6 multi accounts. after awhile those start to add up.

That won't affect anything. Multiple accounts will add 1 to the total served as well as the total in the world. There's such a discrepency because of abandoned nations which are deleted. I know I had a nation a while ago.

The vast majority of nations are almost certainly players who tried the game, got bored with issues after a week or two, and wandered off.

I watched a guy create 240 nearly-identical nations over a period of a couple of weeks, then abandon them to their deaths 28 days from founding. (The skeleton of that region still lives here (http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi/page=display_region/region=the_hoose). No idea why.

I've seen many the invader / defender have a stable of new anonymous puppet nations lying around for purposes of spying / delegacy challenges / whatever. I'm sure many of those die off from disuse, only to be recreated as needed. I've created new nations with the express purpose of responding to a single post, then allowing them to die.

Banned nations probably account for less than 5,000-10,000 of the overall number, and bunches of those are probably a result of single events. One persistent cuss occupied several GMs over New Years with new junk nation after junk nation, to the point that special actions needed to be taken to prevent it from happening again.

Anyway you count it, 1.2 million nations is a lot. I think it may actually be closer to 1.3 or even 1.4 by now. Dayum.

I watched a guy create 240 nearly-identical nations over a period of a couple of weeks, then abandon them to their deaths 28 days from founding. (The skeleton of that region still lives here (http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi/page=display_region/region=the_hoose). No idea why.

My guess would be that the user wanted to get on Ballo's largest regions listing (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=8256816&postcount=86), that's the only thing I could think of.
All hypothetical but still... Theories are welcomed, or maybe the founder of the region would like to contribute :)