Trainwreck 2

Post by **Jake** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 11:17 am

LionIndex wrote:it seems like the boards used to be a lot more active, and I'm saddened that they're no longer that way.

Raw data. Number of message board topics per year:

2001 - 14
2002 - 283
2003 - 741
2004 - 1374
2005 - 1439
2006 - 757
2007 - 560
2008 - 60

Number of message board posts per year:

2001 - 163
2002 - 2772
2003 - 8233
2004 - 18242
2005 - 19334
2006 - 8344
2007 - 5354
2008 - 470

Damn. Didn't realize the boards had fallen off so dramatically after the peak in 2005... Sheesh.

Post by **Jake** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 11:20 am

Posts to GLONO site:

2001 - 299
2002 - 301
2003 - 305
2004 - 374
2005 - 377
2006 - 1038
2007 - 1403
2008 - 236

Comments on GLONO site:

2001 - 671
2002 - 2575
2003 - 2898
2004 - 2263
2005 - 1849
2006 - 1185
2007 - 1357
2008 - 279

LionIndex · Post by **LionIndex** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 12:26 pm

Wow; even though that confirms my suspicions, I'm surprised that there's that much of a drop as well. And I'm also surprised that my hand-wavey factor for the increase of front page content is almost spot on.

Little Timmy · Post by **Little Timmy** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:55 am

Gee, I wonder if the death-watch over the CD has had a quieting effect on this board? I'm still smarting at the news of Schoolkid's Records closing in Chapel Hill -- truly the end of an era. Somehow, it's just a little difficult to get energized over downloading music enough to post about it.

LITTLE TIMMY hobbles offstage, banging the computer with his cane.

LITTLE TIMMY
iTunes, SchmeiTunes. Give me a good ol'
plastic disc any day. Wattsa matter with
kids these days?

Post by **Jake** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:00 pm

I don't want to give anybody the impression that GLONO is slipping. Readership continues to grow; it's just that our readers seem to be getting less vocal.

Visits per year (however Webalizer defines "visits"):

2002 - 189,433
2003 - 262,904
2004 - 407,168
2005 - 530,085
2006 - 778,163
2007 - 948,810
2008 - 173,009 (through Feb)

Pages per year:

2002 - 331,912
2003 - 547,679
2004 - 805,775
2005 - 1,010,403
2006 - 1,689,049
2007 - 2,185,884
2008 - 383,331 (through Feb)

Again, I'm not sure how Webalyzer counts "pages" but regardless, it's going up.

Sven Killer Robot Spacema · Wed Mar 12, 2008 2:13 pm

Couldn't the drop from 2004 to 2005 be directly attributed to registration?

Post by **Jake** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 3:45 pm

Sven Killer Robot Spacema wrote:Couldn't the drop from 2004 to 2005 be directly attributed to registration?

Sven, I might be a little off in my records, but it appears to me that we started requiring registration on the boards around October, 2004. At least, that seems to be the first time you complained about it (that I could find).

So considering that 2005 was the busiest year on the message board, and we (apparently) had registration for that whole year, I don't think it's directly related...

Topics:
2004 - 1374
2005 - 1439
2006 - 757

Posts:
2004 - 18242
2005 - 19334
2006 - 8344

Who knows?

Over on the main site, we started requiring a name and email address sometime around April, 2004. So the data for that might back up your idea.

Comments:
2003 - 2898
2004 - 2263
2005 - 1849

But really, people can type whatever the fuck they want into those fields, so I can't imagine that that would really prevent anybody from posting a comment. There's nothing preventing people from entering [email protected] as their email address...

stickman45 · Post by **stickman45** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 4:05 pm

Jake,

Your new email adderss doesn't seem to be working.

Sven Killer Robot Spacema · Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:35 pm

Jake wrote:[ There's nothing preventing people from entering [email protected] as their email address...

So you don't verify e-mail addresses as legitimate? Is registration mainly a tool for ad sales? I know it's important to show potential advertisers concrete date. "Here as you can see we have this many registered users who are active participants on the site."

Post by **Jake** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:59 pm

Sven Killer Robot Spacema wrote:So you don't verify e-mail addresses as legitimate? Is registration mainly a tool for ad sales? I know it's important to show potential advertisers concrete date. "Here as you can see we have this many registered users who are active participants on the site."

No, not at all. On the site, it's not registration -- it's just filling out a form, and your data gets stored in a cookie on your machine so you don't have to type it in next time. That info gets stored behind the scenes, with us, so if some dumbass spammer stupidly uses the same email address every time, we could ban that email address, but even then, there'd be nothing preventing him from just entering a different email address next time.

For advertisers (and for banning spammers), we use the IP address to determine unique readers. Advertisers don't (seem to) care about registered users as much as they care about how many unique IP addresses have hit the site per month.

For us, requiring users to give a name and email address is simply a way 1) for us to get in touch with a commenter if we need to (we rarely do), and 2) to get people to at least make up a name we can associate with their comment. It's been my experience that asking people to give a name heightens the level of civility.

Anti-spam tools have gotten better recently. It used to be a pain in my ass to have to delete a bunch of crappy, automated spam comments. But they rarely get through anymore.

On the boards, here, it's a different story. We require users to give a valid email address that is then authenticated. Similar reason as on the main site, but on message boards anonymity tends to really ramp up the noise in the signal to noise ratio.

Again, though, our anti-spam stuff has gotten better on the boards too. So who knows, maybe it's time to allow unregistered people to post on the boards again. We could always try it for a while. See how it goes... Why not, right?