Site stats for the year (2024) - until the end of November - "last night" as I write
The red line is the "important" one - and it's been rising since last winter. It's the number of posts made each month. Ordinarily, if I was promoting a website, I would welcome a steady climb. Here, I am far from sure on that because there is some inverse correlation to be seen between post numbers and performance of
GWR▸ - in other words, one of the causes of more posts is a poor performance by the railway and (in my informed view) that is largely the case throughout this year.
October had a surge in post numbers - and that was different; due to the extra posts of "Meet the Manager" amongst other things. So it's double amazing that November - and it's a shorter month too has risen even a tiny bit rather than dropped.
The blue line - number of new threads - is hard to see because of the scale on these axes. That's good because it confirms that w have so many follow ups on the average thread - we're having ongoing conversations and here for good (as if you could doubt that) over so many years
The green and purple lines reveal the noise of the Internet and sites like ours over and above the planned / legitimate reasons we are here.
The green line is the number of people who ask to sign up each month. They tend to be from far, far away from our area, not able to answer our security question, and reported many times by other forum operators to useful central databases for spamming. We get a few genuine signups, but this line on the graph is not an indication of how well we are doing. Similarly,
the purple line shows the maximum number of different people (guests plus members) present (making requests for content) within any one 15 minute period. The surge to 4 times the normal level in July and August shows the loading imposed by a distributed denial of service attack (not aimed at us, I suspect, as other sites would have been effected in the same way) and this dropped away once I added code to separate the attacking visitors from the genuine ones and telling them to go away. They never got to the level of actually denying service though - just slowed responses a bit.
I would be gobsmacked if December rose again ... planned engineering will cause far less immediate upset and far fewer posts that short notice changes - the record I believe is reporting a cancellation 9 minutes before it happened, even though it was clear to some that there was a problem much earlier. The GWR policy of living in hope of a miracle of staffing on the day sure as heck keeps us busy. Lets's hope that this Christmas, the three wise men bring not gold, frankincense and myrrh but train drivers, train managers, and class 175 (or 158 or 150) trains.
