Some Site Statistics

[whole diary]

[grahame]

The Coffee Shop finished 2020 in a flurry of activity, with over 2000 posts in December.

December is always busy with a daily advent quiz, but it's astonishing that in 2020, even after the coronavirus pandemic that has supressed train use (and we're all about train use) it actually grew on the previous year.  Perhaps that's because members are all fed up and wanted sometime to do.  And it could be because this forum has come to be a part of the daily routine for quite a number of well informed members, and as such a a valuable resource between ourselves and for any decision makers and influencers who care to read us - and we know that some do.

184 forum members were logged in during December, 99 of them on New Year's Eve alone. 15 had already been there in 2021 when I put my light out and turned over to go to sleep at a quarter past one.

Last 28 days, v previous 28 days:


Some numbers on that:


Where are people coming from, how many pages are they looking at, how often do they come back?

[grahame]

January 2021 ... no big changes in underlying stats from December 2020, though post numbers are down a little - perhaps because we haven't had an advent quiz ("only 333 days to Christmas")





Couple of comments - the spikes about a week ago were some sort of automata from the west coast of the USA - look odd, but no damage. Take them out, and things like the percentage from the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) goes up above 90% again. And notice the number of pages per visit by country, and bounce rates for the USA, indicate it accounts for less than 1% of pages served.

[grahame]

In May, our Coffee Shop traffic leapt for the wrong reasons. The sudden withdrawal of the majority of GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway)'s long distance train fleet for safety checks, and the timetable chaos, news flows and speculation that followed put our posting rate up five fold overnight. We had the second busiest month in a year, and that without any pre-planned publicity.  Later in the month, the Williams/Shapps report which announced Great British Railways generated another, but short lived traffic spike.  Graphed in sessions day by day (with the dotted line showing the previous month) it looks like this:



Across the whole month, users up by 31% to 4,800 in 19,500 sessions, with a session (visit) on average looking at six pages. 95% of sessions were from within the UK^▸ (United Kingdom). Bounce rate (people who arrive at a page and don't click onto a second page) was around 30% which I feel is a remarkably low figure; a bounce is not necessarily a bad thing is someone arrived at exactly the information they need.

Taking a wide look at some rather odd stats, here's a graph of bounce rate against time ... with the wild fluctuations at regular intervals being because the forum is so quiet in the middle of the night that one or two sessions in an hour (that's the sampling interval) can sent the rate down to 0% or up to 100%:

[grahame]

In two months time, the old Google Analytics data collection mechanism will be switched off ... and I need to find time if I can to see if I can work out and upgrade to the new system.  I probably can, but with a month just ended it seemed like a sensible time to look back and see how we have been doing recently before I start doing things that may results in glitches in data collection.  Here is a staring point:

The Coffee Shop finished 2020 in a flurry of activity, with over 2000 posts in December.

[snip]

184 forum members were logged in during December, 99 of them on New Year's Eve alone. 15 had already been there in 2021 when I put my light out and turned over to go to sleep at a quarter past one.

Taking the Google Analytic graphic from December 2020 and putting it alongside the April 2023 graphic:



Sadly, Google uses different scales - no overall easy conclusion even though it looks like we have grown, we really haven't - I would characterise our number of sessions and views as broadly stable / unchanged.

It's a different story with the number of posts - dropped from over 2,000 in December 2020 to over 1,100 last month - however,  December 2020 was a peak from a running rate in other months around that time of 1,300 and last month was marginally up from the current typical value.   79 members were logged in yesterday (compared to 99 on the previous day before - 31.12.2020).  And there were 155 different users logged in during April 2023 versus 184 in December 2020.

An interpretation?  A drift towards being much more of a rail user and specialist interest club and less of a site that's got new members registering, BUT a substantial number of guests arriving hear in searching for answers.  And we are very much an "every cloud has a silver lining" site - bad news such as the closure of Didcot to Oxford because of the failed bridge has been good news for our stats, generating a thread with over 100 posts.

[Mark A]

An interpretation?  A drift towards being much more of a rail user and specialist interest club and less of a site that's got new members registering, BUT a substantial number of guests arriving hear in searching for answers.  And we are very much an "every cloud has a silver lining" site - bad news such as the closure of Didcot to Oxford because of the failed bridge has been good news for our stats, generating a thread with over 100 posts.

Do I recall that it's the case that there's no route to upgrade the site to offer responsive web design (so it's user-friendly on mobiles) short of ditching the current content and also member subscriptions? That might well boost the 'New members registering', but if it's at the dual costs of a mega-admin session falling on the shoulders of the few* - and also site amnesia that's not so good.

Mark

*One!

[grahame]

Do I recall that it's the case that there's no route to upgrade the site to offer responsive web design (so it's user-friendly on mobiles) short of ditching the current content and also member subscriptions? That might well boost the 'New members registering', but if it's at the dual costs of a mega-admin session falling on the shoulders of the few* - and also site amnesia that's not so good.

Give me a month of Sundays ... though I suppose this month (with 3 bank holiday Mondays) is as close as I could get.

You HAVE given me a thought ... which I will put on the back burner for research until I have a chance; next few weeks are likely to be chaotic!

[grahame]

Well over a year since I have posted on this thread ...  July 2024 was the busiest month on the Coffee Shop so far this year (measured in the number of posts) with 1187 posts. It exceeded 9 of the 12 month from last year too.   Hardly surprising that it was a busy month as it was eventful, with the General Election and a change of government on 4th / 5th,  King's Speech on 17th which announced the bill to "nationalise" the railway and set up GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) with a legal framework, and the cancellation within the last few days of "Restore Your Railway".   

Seventy members logged in during the month, out of 190 logged in year-so-far. Those figures are not directly comparable, but I would like to get some modernisation implemented to allow better viewing from phones and also to reduce the warnings people are given about us possibly being an insecure site - that warning dramatically reduces (devastates) new joiners.

Regular readers will know that July has been something of a washout for me (literally - with my old laptop getting unrecoverable water damage), and I have had to rebuild quite a bit.  I have re-establish a Facebook presence ( https://www.facebook.com/graham.ellis.melksham/ - forum members welcome back as friends and some of you have) and have updated my slumbering LinkedIn account at https://www.linkedin.com/in/wellho/ ... I have yet to re-establish some subsidiary pages and groups - not all will come back but some are there. I have not yet got back onto Twitter / X - never used it much, and early experiments to Pinterest, Instagram and TicToc have not even been on my list to look at.  I've probably got a YouTube channel I could bet back into. I'm also back at https://nextdoor.co.uk/profile/02ZxggpNJJj3qNTWT/ - nextdoor which is much more for local use.

I passed a milestone birthday during the month, and that gave Lisa and I the impetus to retune - no dramatic changes but I came to the reluctant conclusion that I've been disappointed with how little I've achieved as a Town Councillor, how little I've enjoyed it, and how much time I have wasted.  The public are lovely, and I have some good colleagues on the council and we have some excellent staff but that is a very carefully worded comment - read more at http://grahamellis.uk/blog1297.html if you like.  The irony of not taking part in the "beauty contest" and ego-boosting narcissistic activities of the council is that I have much more time for things I enjoy such as the Coffee Shop.

The last few day have brought a combined fuel (gas and electric) bill with 19 entries on one day, and email to a "Mr Wilson" which is not me,  five emails from a solicitor in Devizes as we are updating wills and powers of attorney,  death threats against councillors,  a good friend locally being crushed between two cars in a local car park (mentally she's there, physically it's a question of home adaption) and the possibly of a guest from Ukraine returning for a while to us in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom), and that with complications.   Also I have been alerted that one of our servers will be discontinued at the end of August and I am busy porting email boxes and forwards and domain names.   Which brings me back to some of the comment made earlier about the state of the Coffee Shop.  MASSIVE thanks to the admin and moderator team here for being here, for helping and being such safe pairs of hands, and to members for making our club so welcoming.

[grahame]

Well over a year since I have posted on this thread ...  July 2024 was the busiest month on the Coffee Shop so far this year (measured in the number of posts) with 1187 posts. It exceeded 9 of the 12 month from last year too.   Hardly surprising that it was a busy month as it was eventful, with the General Election and a change of government on 4th / 5th,  King's Speech on 17th which announced the bill to "nationalise" the railway and set up GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) with a legal framework, and the cancellation within the last few days of "Restore Your Railway".   ....

And an astonishing August, up again to 1302 posts and yet without it being such an eventful month for the industry.  Busiest month yet this year. The utter unreliability of train services, especially at the weekend, "help"s though it is rather the sort of help we would prefer to do without.

[TaplowGreen]

Well over a year since I have posted on this thread ...  July 2024 was the busiest month on the Coffee Shop so far this year (measured in the number of posts) with 1187 posts. It exceeded 9 of the 12 month from last year too.   Hardly surprising that it was a busy month as it was eventful, with the General Election and a change of government on 4th / 5th,  King's Speech on 17th which announced the bill to "nationalise" the railway and set up GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) with a legal framework, and the cancellation within the last few days of "Restore Your Railway".   ....

And an astonishing August, up again to 1302 posts and yet without it being such an eventful month for the industry.  Busiest month yet this year. The utter unreliability of train services, especially at the weekend, "help"s though it is rather the sort of help we would prefer to do without.

Looking at the "service" on offer today, I wouldn't be surprised if September sets new records too! 

[grahame]

Looking at the "service" on offer today, I wouldn't be surprised if September sets new records too! 

Yes - up in September and heading up in October too - here is a graph back to the year dot ...



Notable forum date - May 2014 we introduced "Like"s which means that quite a few "I agree" short posts were not made once it caught on.  Others welcome to pick out significant dates in rail and UK^▸ (United Kingdom) terms if you wish.

[Chris from Nailsea]

Coronavirus lockdown restrictions from March 2020 clearly had an impact - far fewer passengers travelling on trains and therefore less for them to post about. 

[grahame]

Coronavirus lockdown restrictions from March 2020 clearly had an impact - far fewer passengers travelling on trains and therefore less for them to post about. 

Indeed - and for a period we did online Zoom sessions to engage with members which perhaps diluted the posts a bit.    It's probably worth commenting too about the very early days - around 2008 - when we had a lot of members who I would describe as "train enthusiasts"; they were and remain very welcome, but they found more appropriate fora which headline the "train spotter" element rather than the "passenger forum" element. 

[grahame]

I am - astonished - that post and thread numbers are up again ... here are the stats (new thread and new posts) monthly for the last year:

 November 2023   117   926
 December 2023   144   1342
 January 2024   97   1153
 February 2024   61   815
 March 2024   101   917
 April 2024   83   725
 May 2024   72   946
 June 2024   97   1005
 July 2024   99   1187
 August 2024   118   1302
 September 2024   134   1389
 October 2024   165   1700

Not so amazing if you take a longer view, mind.

[Chris from Nailsea]

Thanks for those figures, grahame. 

Does my rather habitual practice of 'merging topics' (purely in the interests of continuity, clarity and ease of future reference ) have any impact on those statistics?

CfN. 

[ChrisB]

+1 for each thread that you commented on after merging, I guess.