Some Site Statistics

[whole diary]

[stuving]

Incidentally who programmed the software to show the time as 03:26:53 am 

Why not? Isn't 03:26:53 pm a valid date? The orthography may be unfamiliar, but...

[Surrey 455]

Incidentally who programmed the software to show the time as 03:26:53 am 

Why not? Isn't 03:26:53 pm a valid date? The orthography may be unfamiliar, but...

No. I would call it the time! 

[stuving]

Incidentally who programmed the software to show the time as 03:26:53 am 

Why not? Isn't 03:26:53 pm a valid date? The orthography may be unfamiliar, but...

No. I would call it the time! 

A lot of common sayings don't bear close examination, and "you can't turn back the clock" must be about the silliest. Obviously you can - we all do it to match conventional time as it changes, with place or season. We can also do it for any other reason, for no reason, or by mistake. What we can't do is change time itself to match a clock.

On top of that, if you do turn your clock back a whole day, it says ...exactly the same. While a clock may have a date indication, that bit is a calendar, not a clock. (Electronics and computer jargon is different from everyday usage in this.) Of course you can't change time itself to match a calendar either.

But now I shall have to admit that confusing clocks and calendars just human nature, and hardly warrants such criticism.

[grahame]

We have just completed the busiest August ever on the forum (measured in number of posts) - looking all the way back to 2007. Not by a huge amount, but the busiest anyway. 

Part of the growth can - for once - be assigned to a big positive - that was "Meet the Manager" when Mark Hopwood came onto the forum to answer questions early in the month.  There is still a tail of that to follow up  - thank you for various reminders over the last few days and, please, the delay / lack of that follow up relates to the forum and not to Mark or his team ... and we should concede "Meet the Manager" with a further "Thank you" and a rosy glow of how it worked, even though some of the elements discussed remain far from rosy.

Just like August 2018, the forum was busy in August 2019.  And, sadly, a significant amount of that remains concerns at issues ... staff shortages, cancellations, infrastructure issues have not gone away. Indeed short term cancellations on the TransWilts feel even worse than in previous years, and planned engineering service reductions  have been replaced by very short notice (a few hours up to a a day) which really knock passenger confidence.  We also have new problems like overhead wire problems. I do look forward to a quieter forum at some time in the future because there's nothing going wrong to take about - though even better would be a forum where we're onto positives ... pictures of the construction of Aztec West station, new artwork at Portishead, marketing of the combined rail-and-bus Wessex season, welcoming  the increase from 5 to 8 carriages on the half hourly Swansea to Portsmouth service, and celebrating the ForAll railcard.

[grahame]

In answer to a question I was asked ...

In the last day, 23 different members have posted
In the last week, 67 different members have posted
In the last month, 108 different members have posted

[MVR S&T]

A half hourley Swansea to Portsmouth and back, with 4 Voyager is but a dream, let alone 8 (HST^▸ (High Speed Train)?) would get me out and about again for sure, to Salisbury, Bradford on avon, Bath, Bristol, oh so many other nice places, fom here in Christchurch, well Hinton Admiral.

[grahame]

Some stats from 2019 from Google Analytics, comparing the Coffee Shop's traffic to other domains I took after on our server.

Users	uk	session	pageviews
49	8	57	61	Site 1
278	38	306	340	Site 2
379	54	389	546	Site 3
693	378	974	2879	The Well House Collection
2808	2198	5650	11178	MRUG» (Melksham Rail User Group - site)
65174	58195	269900	1715971	Coffee Shop
390120	37359	455138	534998	Well House Consultants

I know we have some folks here who look after other web sites ... I would be very interested to know what the stats for some of them look like. I appreciate that would probably be private / in confidence rather than publishing stats and naming as I have done for four sites.

[grahame]

In answer to a question I was asked ...

In the last day, 23 different members have posted
In the last week, 67 different members have posted
In the last month, 108 different members have posted

I thought back to this post this evening ... when I noticed that each of the last seventeen posts has been by a different member.    Rather sadly, I'm about to break the sequence as I posted something else just prior to this.

[grahame]

We had a visitor from Eswatini last month (yes, I had to look that up) ... and 4,513 from the UK^▸ (United Kingdom), who came back (on average) between 4 and 5 times (20,216 sessions), visiting (again on average) 6.28 pages per session.

Early in the month, we also saw unwanted activity from Hong Kong - 1,156 users only one of whom came back, and each of whom visited just one page. These users were arriving in droves - arrival rates up to 20 times what we normally see and tested our server (I had at one point to reload databases); for the month as a whole, they accounted for 18% of our visitors (grand total 6,462) but less than 1% of pages served.  I have added something to our server configuration to spot these visitors and reject their requests meaning that they no longer get anywhere near the stats I am reporting, but there does remain a small resource call each time they ask and we tell them to "**** off". In future, I would expect to see other similar activity, modified (as happens with these things) so that they no longer get sent packing until I put another line in the server config. I don't believe this is a specific attack on the Coffee Shop - just us being caught in crossfire.

1670 posts in the month - not untypical for a February, with 125 new topics started. Which works out as 13.4 posts per topic.  5 years ago, it was 11.9 posts per topic and 10 years ago it was 12.2, so once again remarkably stable.

[grahame]

What an extraordinary month! Various sources - All for March 2020

Marginally fewer different users


Number of pages broadly unchanged


Number of pages per session increases


Number of posts increases during month


Public transport use falls off a cliff! (Government briefing)


and via https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52105526 :

[grahame]

April 2020 - 2184 Coffee Shop posts in the 30 day, with 102 members posting during the month. And those stats are startlingly similar to previous Aprils - we've had 1213, 1531, 1765, 2132 and 2370 in the previous five years numbers of posters in the month 124, 106, 104, 125, 116, 102.  But I do note changes - a thinnng out of GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) and other publice transport operational posts, and a broadening of topics such as pastimes such as brodcast media.   

This is pretty much what I would expected bearing in mind the current Covid-19 emergency changes ... a paid survey report coming back with those results would typically warrant an "I could have told them that" and "what a waste of money doing the survey" response. But hidden within the numbers, a slight decline from last year in single-post visitors during the month, countered by more posts from 'regulars' - a 15% chargeover, if you like.  Again, with thought this might have been predicted.

Being "as expected", we have coped well and the forum has continued - perhaps one of the few normallities at the moment. Further challenges await - much depencent on the waves we have to ride in the storm of restarts, the potential sinking of services that were inconvenient, outdated or loss making, or the doldrums calm of continued lockdown, with the crew running out of supplies of stories, patience and sanity.

[grahame]

"Has the formum gone quiet?" ... a question of me the other day by a regular vistor. Hmmm ... it feels a bit that way. So I took a look back at ten years of stats - graphing posts per month (red line) and new topics per month (blue dots).



At first glance, July looks like a disaterous fall, with a levelling in August.  But then look back at the sawtooth and you'll see that traffic plummetted in early summer in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 ... not quite every year, but certainly an underlying seasonal pattern.  Further, we can correlate the forum's business to some extent against the performance of the customer provision by GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway), and I might suggest that recent years where summer posting have remained bouyant are summer years in which staff shortages and short forms have had a serious impact on performance it a way that we didn't see a few years back.   This summer, we're very much put of that comfort zone of normallity, few of us are traveling as much as we used to (some hardly at all) and perhaps it's remarkable how well the forum has held up.   Watching brief, adjustments to make perhaps, but no panic.  And a note that that the verical axes on that graph are compressed / not showing all the way down to zero.

Where perhaps we have drift-changed over the past few years is towards a wider area of posting - more topics of general rail interest not just GWR, more historic and heritage posts, a little more on other public transport, and also much more forward looking stuff to social change, climate change, and politics, and how they will effect rail and other transport use.  I'm delighted that the proportion of 'member only' and internal moderator posts remains very low indeed (though such posts are included in the counts above).

Now - what is the pattern of our visitors - this from Google Analytics for the last six months:



I am profoundly unshocked by anything here!   For comparison, here is the same diagram for the last month for http://www.wellho.net - my main business website, not gently servicng open source hints and tips and visitors not selected on natural geography, but rather on where in the world people are wrifing software and looking for answers in English.

[GBM]

Was the USA sourcing from yourselves on your cruise holiday perchance!

[grahame]

Was the USA sourcing from yourselves on your cruise holiday perchance!

No ... based on worldwide searches for straightforward code examples in open source programming languages.  Most example provides start with the simplest possible "hello world" example, then take ten steps in their second example to something that's so complex it flies over people's heads.  We have a huge number of examples (but now becoming a bit stale) which help with the intermediate steps.

[grahame]

The start of a new month is when I look back at our site and server for the last month and do a quick review of how we've been doing. 1316 posts in September, down from 1375, and 1339 the month before.  Remarkably stable considering our server move.  Other stats and graphs are pretty much "no news" too.  Here is the graph from the domain - so including the switch point (I have drawn a red line at about the point we switched)