Is the Forum Failing?
Posted: Mon Jul 19, 2010 3:59 am
Well, the short answer is, yes, it appears that it is, and perhaps not just from seasonal attrition.
The statistics for the forum, and the site as a whole have not be looking good lately, traffic is down in an accelerating spiral. Some of this can realistically be attributed to the more strict spam filtering that the server performs. Many of the bogus requests, phishing exploits, and access log spamming that were inflating the stats have been pruned back, and no longer show up in the numbers. This by itself does not account for the drop-off in visitor traffic. Even simple observation will show that the forum is getting much less posting these days.
Let's look at the hard numbers. Here's the General Report for the forum: http://www.mrsharkey.com/stats/forum_general Look at the line chart a the top of the page, the red and blue dashes represent page views.
From the first day the forum was installed, I denied it being listed in Google, Yahell!, etc, as the majority of spam and exploits are aimed at forum installations located by directory searches. The was very little traffic on the forum, and it always struggled to have even a few new posts most weeks. The page views are pretty flat, with a few anomalous exceptions, such as December of 2008 (don't know what happened there).
Then in January-February of 2009, I installed the new content management system on the site, and for the first time, allowed the forum to be indexed in search engines and directories. You can see that the traffic jumped right up to five times what it had been before. Most of this was spam, but I had hardened the forum against such garbage for the most part. The spam didn't show up much on the forum, but the bad requests still got logged in the stats as traffic.
In August of 2009, Rudy joined the forum, and things really started to take off. His frequent posting drew in lurkers, old members who hadn't posted in years, and new folks who dropped in from searches, etc, registered and decided to stay. The forum began to take on a life of it's own.
December 2009, I discovered a very effective spam filter program that I instituted on the site as a whole. It was so efficient that it prevented spam bots from even viewing pages, much less posting crap on the forum. The statistics show a significant lessening of "traffic" on the forum, but what that really reflects is a fallback to views and posting by legitimate users for once.
Since that time, forum traffic has steadily decreased. June 2010 saw only 17,300 page views, down from a high of 31,200 in March. Seasonal fluctuation? Perhaps. Time will tell. The weekly traffic shows a similar downward trend, with last week being the first uptick in traffic I've seen in a while.
The site statistics follow a similar trend, although site traffic is a much larger volume, it's declining as well.
The next five months or so should be telling. Might be that as the weather in the Northern Hemisphere declines, site traffic will climb back to "normal". It's also possible that MrSharkey.Com has saturated the web and is no longer a growth product. There are more sites dedicated to small housing, mobile living and alternative dwelling. I'd expect that this would mean greater interest and more traffic, but it also means a dilution of the available viewer base.
What can you as an interested member do? Well, not much more than keep posting, spread the word around the rest of the 'net, and cross your fingers.
(I wonder if the decline has anything to do with those millions of Chinese IP addresses I ban each week???)
The statistics for the forum, and the site as a whole have not be looking good lately, traffic is down in an accelerating spiral. Some of this can realistically be attributed to the more strict spam filtering that the server performs. Many of the bogus requests, phishing exploits, and access log spamming that were inflating the stats have been pruned back, and no longer show up in the numbers. This by itself does not account for the drop-off in visitor traffic. Even simple observation will show that the forum is getting much less posting these days.
Let's look at the hard numbers. Here's the General Report for the forum: http://www.mrsharkey.com/stats/forum_general Look at the line chart a the top of the page, the red and blue dashes represent page views.
From the first day the forum was installed, I denied it being listed in Google, Yahell!, etc, as the majority of spam and exploits are aimed at forum installations located by directory searches. The was very little traffic on the forum, and it always struggled to have even a few new posts most weeks. The page views are pretty flat, with a few anomalous exceptions, such as December of 2008 (don't know what happened there).
Then in January-February of 2009, I installed the new content management system on the site, and for the first time, allowed the forum to be indexed in search engines and directories. You can see that the traffic jumped right up to five times what it had been before. Most of this was spam, but I had hardened the forum against such garbage for the most part. The spam didn't show up much on the forum, but the bad requests still got logged in the stats as traffic.
In August of 2009, Rudy joined the forum, and things really started to take off. His frequent posting drew in lurkers, old members who hadn't posted in years, and new folks who dropped in from searches, etc, registered and decided to stay. The forum began to take on a life of it's own.
December 2009, I discovered a very effective spam filter program that I instituted on the site as a whole. It was so efficient that it prevented spam bots from even viewing pages, much less posting crap on the forum. The statistics show a significant lessening of "traffic" on the forum, but what that really reflects is a fallback to views and posting by legitimate users for once.
Since that time, forum traffic has steadily decreased. June 2010 saw only 17,300 page views, down from a high of 31,200 in March. Seasonal fluctuation? Perhaps. Time will tell. The weekly traffic shows a similar downward trend, with last week being the first uptick in traffic I've seen in a while.
The site statistics follow a similar trend, although site traffic is a much larger volume, it's declining as well.
The next five months or so should be telling. Might be that as the weather in the Northern Hemisphere declines, site traffic will climb back to "normal". It's also possible that MrSharkey.Com has saturated the web and is no longer a growth product. There are more sites dedicated to small housing, mobile living and alternative dwelling. I'd expect that this would mean greater interest and more traffic, but it also means a dilution of the available viewer base.
What can you as an interested member do? Well, not much more than keep posting, spread the word around the rest of the 'net, and cross your fingers.
(I wonder if the decline has anything to do with those millions of Chinese IP addresses I ban each week???)