Some Site Statistics

[whole diary]

[grahame]

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. 

Minimal, Chris ... but ...

You may recall I celebrated my 8000th new thread a few days ago, and moved on a handful beyond there.   I'm noticing my number of created threads has slipped back, and at one point I wondered if I was going to have to celebrate an "8000th thread" all over again.   Saved, I think, by the 1844 railways act and Tintern Station!

[Chris from Nailsea]

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

Hmm.  I tend to post, just once, after I have merged some topics or posts within topics, simply to explain what I have done - purely out of courtesy to our members / readers.  

CfN. 

[grahame]

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^▸ (Great Western Railway) - 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.

[grahame]

First server stats over the BIG changes - with thanks to Google Analytics sorting out the wood from the trees:

Traffic level - number of visitors over the last 4 weeks (solid) and previous 4 (dashed).   Systems flagged up a warning that traffic was low on 25th December (can't imagine why) then again on 28th (not a surprise as I moved the domain.   Good to see it rebuilding from there



And here's a visitor by country - showing 199 out of 211 in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) which is a marvellous conformation of real human traffic of around 200 guests a day.

[grahame]

Here we are, three weeks in to "Mark 2" - since the day I pressed the button to bring in our new structure, transferring our domain names to a new server and running under the secure http protocol, with that new server acting as a receptionist / front door to Coffee Shop. 

99% working. The two most significant outstanding issues remaining are the awkward way "likes" are registered now and the issues that some email recipients have in receiving notifications now that our main forum engine is no longer named the same as the front door. And there are a whole host of other little things with some of the dusty old content being even dustier.  On the other hand, I have had the opportunity to make some substantive updates and have opened the door with more to come.

I knew that our search engine visibility had been reduced for a while by our continued use of http rather than https. I was taken aback by the vigour and speed with which the Google search engine started indexing our pages once that magic extra "s" was added into their addresses and this extra traffic caused.  It has now stabalised out with around 400,000 requests a day to our reception server of which around 250,000 are passed on to our worker server - which (around 250,000) is a similar number to handled before, though with an extra 60% handled by the reception machine.  And those numbers are way down on a peak of over 900,000 requests on 3rd January of which 800,000 were passed on.  Good to see that the number of requests handled by the reception server still grows - much of that is due to caching of responses so that queries don't need to be repeated.

Member posts are down this month. There was a seed of concern in my mind about this, but then it's the quiet season, there's a blanket cancellation of everything Westbury for a month so less to talk about, and no advent quiz. It looks like members are around - just not finding as much to write about.

Graphics

- requests to our our Coffee Shop servers since the start of November

- loading on our reception server

- loading on our worker server (this was off the scale a couple of weeks ago!)

- Google analytic - real visitor counts over the last 56 days

[grahame]

Two completed months with the new structure and looking at the loading of the two servers (only the Coffee Shop accesses - there are other sites on the same servers):



There is a lot more indexing going on - the early spurt was Google, and Bing and OpenAI have been drawing through. There have also been a number of less welcome spiders, some of which have verged on "denial of service" levels of access, been distributed so they are hard to link, and pretended to be human too by things like using all sorts of different browser type identifiers and sharing cookies around between them.  I remain on watching brief.

Post numbers, after a drop in January, are on the rise again - thank you members.   February 2025 at 1131 posts was substantially up on February 2024 at 815 posts. And I don't think that rise was caused by new performance problems at GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) which has been in the past an unwanted reason for traffic to rise.   There remain a handful of other issues where I look at the stats and may remaking adjustments - the site(s) have various monitors on them so that I am usually alerted to issues when a pattern changes, long before it has a major effect on visible performance to people on the forum.

[grahame]

Another month, another graphic as we come to the end of March - up to and including today's log file turnover



In the whole "play" of things you can see how insignificant (traffic wise) the break on 25th March was ... but the need to fix that was just the icing on the cake of a silly-busy time.   

In "other life" there has been an absurd amount of worry at various Town Council issues - a four day tribunal case in December, budget setting in January resulting in (we are told) the redundancy of a senior manager so that next year's budget can balance, our responsible finance officer feeling so hurt during a meeting in February that he walked out there and then, leaving his council laptop behind. No passover that I am aware of.  This month the tribunal hitting the local press, and my colleagues objecting to pay the Neighbourhood Plan bills just as that come to fruition.  I have some sympathy as there are unexpected late costs as this comes close to adoption and indeed I feel mislead by assurances on the cost of this too, which have been in excess of promised maxima.  Tonight is my final - THANK GOODNESS - full Town Council meeting. I have just two more economic development and planning committee meetings next month, though that is a misnomer because (in my view) the council has largely stepped aside from economic development and it's become a quick run through local planning applications twice a month. It's reactive rather than pro-active. Sad.

I have - here for the Coffee Shop and other sites - lots of code that has been in test but not made easily accessible yet, and a number of tweaks to improve use, indexing, searching ... but they need a clear head unencumbered by questions about the disappaearance of memorial benches, the awful state of signage in bus stops, and the cost of removing redundant swimming pool equipment.  I am really looking forward.

I have checked this message carefully to ensure that everything I have written and referenced is in the public domain all ready, and where an opinion is expressed it is my personal opinion and not that of Melksham Town Council