Whether Jim Lindgren in his post here is trying to stir up panic among Obama supporters or is merely noting an interesting sort of fringe behavior among abnormally voluble wackos I couldn't say for sure.
Whatever the case, Lindgren breathlessly declares that "[y]ou would not believe how the Sarah Palin pick is playing out at the Hillary Clinton Forum [here]." Lindgren is impressed by the uniformity of the pro-responses. So are his commenters. Indeed, such striking uniformity lead liberal commenters to suspect astroturfing (as it did me). Lindgren argues this can't be, because (among other reasons) there have been over 300,000 comments on the website since February.
Having since looked at the forum, I admit that I'm less sure now than I was initially that there is obviously sockpuppetry afoot. But I'd still like to put this number into context.
So I go to the page Lindgren links to.* As I look at it, there are 50 comments total. I've listed all the members who posted a comment on this page (some left multiple comments), along with their total number of posts (in parentheses):
B positive (2,821)
Christines (2,300)
DeLana (95)
hillary1 (755)
Eddie3dfx (1,441)
VANITY4HILLARY (699)
greenleaf (178)
writerchick (2,185)
(7,312)
12counts (68)
Bella (757)
Iam4Hillary (2,780)
MaryinOregon (1,022)
Frances (716)
foxyladi14 (1,894)
jenaset (49)
Gumshew (35)
JeffTN (65)
swannyj (606)
somerset (55)
Tom Terrific (611)
Muzza (13,059) (!)
Florida Dawn (237)
blazer615 (99)
gd801 (73)
kpmom (116)
So on a page taken at random, there are 27 posters who have posted an aggregate 40,568 posts. This yields a mean of just over 1,500 posts. What this means is that to log 300,000 posts would require only 200 such posters.
There are two points to draw from this.
One, the ravings of 200 HRC bitter-enders shouldn't exactly set anyone quaking in their boots.
Two, a part-time staff of 200 would probably not make for the most elaborate astroturfing operation that's ever been hatched.
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*The pages are dynamic, so I've uploaded a copy of the html here, which at least logs the commenter IDs.
UPDATE: As commenter Robert Waldmann below points out, the page I link to is not a representative sample. Just to be clear then (and I wasn't clear enough), I was not suggesting, and it would not be reasonable to infer from the minimal data I collected, that there are only 200 total posters. (In fact, the site itself clearly shows a membership of 5,000-plus in their stats.)
