  As online communities become increasingly popular, researchers have tried to
examine participating activities in online communities as well as how to
sustain online communities. However, relatively few studies have tried to
understand what kinds of participants constitute online communities. In this
study, we try to contribute online community research by developing "common
language" to classify different participants in online communities.
Specifically, we argue that the previous way to classify participants is not
sufficient and accurate, and we propose a continuum to classify participants
based on participants' overall trend of posting activities. In order to further
online community research, we also propose potential directions for future
studies.
