Some Site Statistics

[whole diary]

[grahame]

For anyone who's interested in seeing the program I used, I've put in online at http://www.wellho.net/resources/ex.php?item=y106/forum.py and added further commentary at http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4236_Using-Python-to-analyse-last-years-forum-logs-Good-coding-practise-discussion-.html . 

<advert>Please tell your techincal friends and colleagues (and yourself) that if they or you want to learn Python (or Ruby, Perl, PHP, Lua, C, C++ or Tcl) that I'm your man. You'll be helping to keep the server that hosts this forum running (it has to be paid for somehow!). And - new for 2014 - you can travel practiaclly travel all the way to us by much more sustainable public transport. If I'm coming to train you on site, I'll be coming all the way by train 9 times out of 10! See http://www.wellho.net </advert>

[TonyK]

 
<advert>Please tell your technical friends and colleagues (and yourself) that if they or you want to learn Python that I'm your man.

I do a reasonable "Dead Parrot" sketch myself, you know...

[grahame]

It's quite a while since I updated this occasional series of "how is the forum doing?" reports ... so a good time to look at the last three months, and compare them to a couple of months at the beginning of the year - what I would describe as a typical January, and an extraordinary February (when the sea wall breach at Dawlish coincided with a huge surge of visitors).

Code:

Month		Aug	Sept	Oct			Jan	Feb (2014)
Sessions	31906	28198	31734			31419	37701
Users		13598	11187	12018			12685	16801
Pageviews	158281	147343	190408			155562	204850
Pages/session	4.96	5.23	6.00			4.95	5.43
Bounce Rate	43.10%	40.10%	36.92%			41.92%	41.55%
New Sessions	38.30%	35.32%	33.71%			35.95%	40.49%
Busiest Hour	91 s.	79 s.	107 sessions		94 s.	180 s.
UK▸  (United Kingdom) visitors	94.44%	95.01%	95.22%			95.43%	92.80%
New Posts	1887	1782	2291			1645	2424
New Topics	153	171	182			135	104

The top eight statistics are from our Google Analytics, the bottom two are from our forum stats.

As a quick "how are we doing" shorthand, I keep an eye on the "New Posts" on the forum - and indeed Chris from Nailsea's graph, updated every month at the top of this board, keeps us all usefully in the picture on that - thanks for keeping that up, Chris. 

In my view, the figures combine to show a picture of good stability, with the biggest changes being due to the external feature of whether or not there are big happenings effecting passenger train services in the Great Western area - those changes aren't a surprise and are welcomed as they show that we're in line with the daily pulse.  And since October was marked by a number of severe disruptions between Paddington and Reading (mostly NOT due to First, for the record!) I'm going to hope - for the sake of our members - for a quieter November.

[grahame]

Our web server's log files are pretty big, and it's pretty hard to get an idea of what's going on from numbers - a picture paints many thousand words.    Here are diagrams of requests per hour from the February logs.





Technicalities (how to program things like this and to learn it), grabbed from the course I was giving last week:
http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4445_Graphing-presentations-in-Python-huge-data-numpy-and-matplotlib.html

[grahame]

Two attachments - a Google Analytics summary graph from the first four days of last week, and the same graph from the first four days of this week - I look a look to see whether there was any effect (and if so what) on our traffic from last Monday's announcement on the operation of trains in our area by First until 2019.  It's probably a fair assumption that the traffic rise of people viewing posts was caused by the announcement - we can see it lead to a lot of extra contributions, and I can see no other factors that would have caused the rise in readership.

(The 20,687 views chart is from 16th to 19th March; the 32,076 one from 23rd to 26th March)

[grahame]

In response to questions about another site that we host, I've been back to Google Analytic logs to the start of 2013 - see http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4474_.html for graphs of how the Coffee Shop has performed against their measures over the past 28 months.

[grahame]

Although I don't post monthly in this thread, I do keep an eye on "how we're doing" month by month.  Signs of things being a bit different in the sentiment of members would very likely show up in subtle changes in use patterns.

We continue to have about 1,000 human sessions per day, totalling around 5,000 page views.  Around 380 of the sessions are for single pages (bounces) - so the "5 pages per session" chart could be split down to around 380 sessions to one page, and 420 user sessions visiting an impressive 11 pages on average.   Graphs shown are 1st January to 31st August 2015. 

Not shown, but 19 out of 20 sessions are from people within the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) (and many of the rest will be spam signup requests, of which we get a reduced but still significant number)

Many thanks to the admin and moderator team for helping keep on top of this lot. Yet I'm delighted just how little authoritative intervention is necessary - and that's a big "thank you" to the members too.

[grahame]

2015 ... 20,711 posts in 1,421 new subjects. 1,864,301 page views in 349,307 sessions by 120,976 users. A high of 1,855 sessions on 21st September, and a low of 460 on 25th December. 95% of sessions were from the UK^▸ (United Kingdom), 1% from the USA, and the remaining 4% spread across 146 other countries. I remain amazed at just how many new subjects we come up with and how busy the site remains.  A huge thank you to all our contributors.

And a piece of trivia ... a single page from each of Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania, Timore-Leste, Togo, Swazilan, Syria, El Salvador, Somalia, Rwanda, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Malawi, Macedonia, Madagasgar, Moldova, Monaco, Liberia, Guatemaa, Guadaloupe, Gambia, Greenland, Belarus, Botswana, Antigua & Barbuda and Afghanistan.

[ChrisB]

Do they simply ignore those views from pax who don't let Google know their location? Or are they counted as a sort of 'we don't know'?

[grahame]

Looking back at the last five marches - 2017 at the top down to 2013 at the bottom



Source - Google Analytics

[grahame]

A promotional montage showing how busy we are and accompanying a Facebook post telling people what we're about.

If you're a Facebook member - please share - https://www.facebook.com/TransWilts/posts/1114374198662621 - although we have nearly 10,000 visitors in a month, I suspect there might be a few more who haven't heard of us 

[Adelante_CCT]

What does the map of Britain show, and why does it look as if parts of Sussex, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire are flooded?

[grahame]

What does the map of Britain show, and why does it look as if parts of Sussex, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire are flooded?

Visitors to the forum by where in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) their located ...the more from any one place, the bigger the circle and the deeper the colour. It's a map from Google Analytics and because so much internet traffic is marked as just "London" it looks odd.

Here are the top ten - number (and percentage) of sessions

Code:

1.	London	5,823(22.60%)
2.	Bristol	2,268(8.80%)
3.	Reading	1,191(4.62%)
4.	(not set)	1,115(4.33%)
5.	Oxford	572(2.22%)
6.	Exeter	445(1.73%)
7.	Slough	415(1.61%)
8.	Trowbridge	380(1.48%)
9.	Birmingham	370(1.44%)
10.	Maidenhead	337(1.31%)

The last 10 places - with one session each - were

Code:

912.	Catalina Foothills	
913.	Delta charter Township	
914.	North Decatur	
915.	Lucena	
916.	Lipa	
917.	Tartu	
918.	Aktobe	
919.	Tachileik	
920.	Gibraltar	
921.	Portoroz

[LiskeardRich]

What does the map of Britain show, and why does it look as if parts of Sussex, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire are flooded?

Visitors to the forum by where in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) their located ...the more from any one place, the bigger the circle and the deeper the colour. It's a map from Google Analytics and because so much internet traffic is marked as just "London" it looks odd.

Here are the top ten - number (and percentage) of sessions

Code:

1.	London	5,823(22.60%)
2.	Bristol	2,268(8.80%)
3.	Reading	1,191(4.62%)
4.	(not set)	1,115(4.33%)
5.	Oxford	572(2.22%)
6.	Exeter	445(1.73%)
7.	Slough	415(1.61%)
8.	Trowbridge	380(1.48%)
9.	Birmingham	370(1.44%)
10.	Maidenhead	337(1.31%)

The last 10 places - with one session each - were

Code:

912.	Catalina Foothills	
913.	Delta charter Township	
914.	North Decatur	
915.	Lucena	
916.	Lipa	
917.	Tartu	
918.	Aktobe	
919.	Tachileik	
920.	Gibraltar	
921.	Portoroz

I probably visited a few times from Skines, Chania, Crete during June.

[bobm]

Since I upgraded my broadband some IP locators have moved me to Scotland.....