The Statistics Strike Back

[complich8]

I've got a couple minutes of downtime, and I figured it's been a while since I posted anything about stats and forum usage and whatnot, so I might as well while I'm thinking about it. If you like statistics, read on! If not, gtfo now, k?



So I've been running google analytics here since about the middle of April, and have got a bunch of interesting stats to tie in together with my usual stuff. Here's the info I've pulled out of that so far:

In the last 30 days we've gotten 49,453 visits. 38% of them were new (either new ip's or first-time visitors). The average time people spend on the forums is apparently about 6:20, which I guess would incorporate the people who spend hours here and the people who stumble on us in a search and then disappear. That's up a bit from May 2008, where we had 41,852 visits. The overall trend is slowly increasing on average, which is kind of cool.

68% of our visitors are running firefox, with ie holding about a 20% market share. Opera and Chrome are in third and fourth with 5% and 3.5% respectively, and safari's down at 1.5%. We've got someone browsing on a psp, and someone on a ps3. Both seem to stop by regularly for a couple page views about every day.

Back in May, the browser picture was more like 69% firefox, 24% ie, 5% opera and 1% safari. So it looks like Chrome didn't hurt firefox or opera significantly, but took a chunk out of ie's market share. Safari's also on the rise.

Windows is the seriously dominant OS here, with about 94% market share. Mac's got about 4%, with linux clocking in a bit over 1% of our visitors. Pretty much everyone's running 32-bit color depth (93% of visitors), with 5% running 24 bit.

Screen resolutions are particularly interesting, because they're all over the place. There's no clear dominant resolution. 20% of visitors are at 1024x768, while another 20% are at 1280x1024. 15% are 1680x1050, 14% are at 1280x800 and 13% are at 1440x900. My screen res (1600x1200) comes in at number 11 with right around 1% of the visits, while 1% of the visitors here have 1080p tv's they're using as monitors, and 5% have 1920x1200 monitors. From a designer's perspective, looks like a design friendly to 1024x768 is the way to go here: 2.77% of our visitors have displays narrower than 1024 pixels.

We don't really use flash or java here, but a lot of people need to upgrade: 59% of our visitors are running flash 10.0r12 (which is the current stable version for windows: 10.0.12.36). Next most popular is 9.0r124, which is subject to this: http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1189 . You should consider going to adobe's site and updating your player... 'cause for at least a fourth of the people here, you're vulnerable to that exploit. 86% of our visitors have java enabled.

32% of forum visitors come in from the front page. Another 32% of visitors come in directly to the forums. The last third are coming in mainly from google and other search engines. Of those, the top searches are "gotwoot" and "gotwoot forum".

That's all I got from google analytics so far, which is kind of a lot. Should be interesting seeing those trends change over time as the data set gets bigger.

But that's not all I've got. That's just the easy part.

On reputations, 21,352 reputation hits have been given out for a total of 247,255 points of reputation (positive and negative combined). Of that, reputation has largely skewed positive, with a net movement in reputation of 124,229 points since the system was turned on. People have given out 6959 negative reps, 13438 positive, and 955 zero-point reputations. 1134 people have been repped, but only 345 people have given reputation. Don't be shy, folks.

The forums have had a total of 364,824 posts which are still in the database somewhere. Of these, 1909 are owned by userid 0 (which means that they either belonged to a user who was purged for inactivity and low post count (users under like 3 posts who hadn't visited in half a year or more) or they somehow got disassociated from. Digging deeper, nearly 1500 of these posts are that "purged for low count and inactivity" group.

In the last year (jan 2008-jan 2009(, we've had 52,415 posts. where in the year preceeding it (jan 2007-jan 2008) we had 42,176. Of those this year, general discussion has had 14,186 posts, for 27% of the total discussion. General anime comes in second at 9504 posts (18%), where The Flaming Pit is comes in at third with 9418 posts (also 18%). Of course, 90% of the discussion in the Flaming Pit is shitposting, so ..... take it for what it is, I guess. Naruto and Naruto Open Discussion bring up 4th and 5th, with 3475 and 3125 posts each (for just under 13% of the total forum traffic being about Naruto in some way).

Last year (2007-2008), general anime had 9584 posts (23%), General discussion had 9280 (22%), Naruto Manga/Open Discussion came in third with 4063 posts (9.6%) and the flaming pit came in fourth with 3838 posts (9.1%). So the net effect of this is that the flame pit has more than doubled in popularity in the last year. Of course, since the flame pit came into existence on July 31, 2007, it only had 4 months to gain any sort of popularity at all in that stats window. Projecting that, the pit's actually slightly less active than it was when it was first created (expecting nearly 12000 posts in a 1 year span, only getting a bit over 9000).

Anyway, that's all I've thought of to find out so far. Anyone else got any interesting questions that I could rephrase into sql queries?

[LaZie]

I could add that i'm one of the few who browses on the PS3 :)

[Kraco]

where The Flaming Pit is comes in at third with 9418 posts (also 18%). Of course, 90% of the discussion in the Flaming Pit is shitposting, so ..... take it for what it is, I guess.

Haha. Even the stone-cold statistics suddenly had an opinion inserted in, proving Complich is a human being, after all...

Pretty interesting statistics. Indicates the forum is far from dead, for sure.

[Buffalobiian]

Is there anything left unanalyzed? :p

Out of curiosity, how much private messaging to people do on these forums? Everybody does a bit, or a selected few doing it feverishly?

[David75]

I browse from different OSes and screen rez...
Vista x64
7x64
7x32
Ubuntu
XPx86

Sometimes from my iPhone when I wait for an apointment... So safari and OSXportable (or whatever name it has) and low rez of course.

Rez are
1280*1080
1680*1050
1920*1080 cause the laptop I use for this message has that rez (pretty convenient since it has blu-ray, when I'm bored in a faraway hotel....)

So I guess I'm one of those hard to pinpoint in stats ;) but of course there's still the user id when it comes to singularities.

Other than that, it's interresting to see that gotwoot really isn't dying at all, referring to a thread started weeks ago.

[Mugen]

wow you can see all that...

[Death BOO Z]

w so, what percent of users use only one computer\device to watch the forums, and how many have multiple IPs?

[Animeniax]

Can you tell how many or what percentage of posts come from newer members (members with join dates in late 2008 or 2009) versus how many came from long established members, and where are the newbies posting, mostly in anime or off-topic?

[Buffalobiian]

w so, what percent of users use only one computer\device to watch the forums, and how many have multiple IPs?

I'd fall under this one. I only use my desktop and laptop, while my dynamic IP keeps changing almost every time my connection breaks. (fortunately it hasn't been happening much of late)

[Uchiha Barles]

While this may be non personal specifications of the machines we're using...it's quite scary actually. Fear google people. I'm warning you now.

[Xelbair]

1080 and 1050 res are mine, 1080 on pc and ps3 , 1050 mostly.

And here is my question, what is the biggest thread and how many times it is bigger than typical thread.

[Buffalobiian]

And here is my question, what is the biggest thread and how many times it is bigger than typical thread.

I can answer the first part.

It's this thread (http://forums.gotwoot.net/showthread.php?t=15869), surprise surprise.

If you don't count flame pit threads, the bitching thread's the next biggest. I think I said this somewhere in "Today I learned".

[Nadouku]

Hmm, this is something very interesting to share. What about the amount of Reputation with comments on them?

[XanBcoo]

There's something quite comforting about reading through a bunch of statistics like that. I loved this post. Your updates are always interesting, man.


Out of curiosity, how much private messaging to people do on these forums? Everybody does a bit, or a selected few doing it feverishly?
I also think this would be interesting to know.

[RyougaZell]

Screen resolutions are particularly interesting, because they're all over the place. There's no clear dominant resolution. 20% of visitors are at 1024x768, while another 20% are at 1280x1024. 15% are 1680x1050, 14% are at 1280x800 and 13% are at 1440x900. My screen res (1600x1200) comes in at number 11 with right around 1% of the visits, while 1% of the visitors here have 1080p tv's they're using as monitors, and 5% have 1920x1200 monitors. From a designer's perspective, looks like a design friendly to 1024x768 is the way to go here: 2.77% of our visitors have displays narrower than 1024 pixels.


Im feeling special :D

Since the flamepit doesn't count towards post count... can we do a query to see how many of those 9,000 posts are distributed? Just top 5 posters or something like that. We don't even need to know WHO, just how many posts some of us have spent there.

[complich8]

Can you tell how many or what percentage of posts come from newer members (members with join dates in late 2008 or 2009) versus how many came from long established members, and where are the newbies posting, mostly in anime or off-topic?

That's actually a pretty interesting question. I'll let the result speak for itself:


+----------+-----------+------------+
| joinyear | postcount | percentage |
+----------+-----------+------------+
| 2003 | 8688 | 16.5445 |
| 2004 | 9022 | 17.1805 |
| 2005 | 11141 | 21.2157 |
| 2006 | 10171 | 19.3685 |
| 2007 | 5851 | 11.1420 |
| 2008 | 7496 | 14.2746 |
| 2009 | 144 | 0.2742 |
+----------+-----------+------------+


This is for posts between a year ago yesterday and today. 2007 was a bad year for poster longevity, apparently :p.


w so, what percent of users use only one computer\device to watch the forums, and how many have multiple IPs?

There's a variety of technical reasons that make that pretty much impossible to reliably determine. Sorry... not gonna happen.



Is there anything left unanalyzed? :p

Out of curiosity, how much private messaging to people do on these forums? Everybody does a bit, or a selected few doing it feverishly?

136 users have sent private messages this year. Of those, 48 have sent exactly 1 message, 45 are between 2 and 5, 13 are between 5 and 10, and 30 are over 10. The most private messages sent this year were sent by a spambot named travel2009, which I've since purged. The second and third most are ... well ... two people who've met with other issues of late >_>. Lots of usage among the top couple of users, but lots of users using it too.


Im feeling special :D

Since the flamepit doesn't count towards post count... can we do a query to see how many of those 9,000 posts are distributed? Just top 5 posters or something like that. We don't even need to know WHO, just how many posts some of us have spent there.

There were 99 total contributors to the pit. The top 20 have >100 posts each, with the top 3 at 1074, 876 and 876 flame pit posts, respectively. The top 20 users account for 7872 of the 9434 posts I'm currently looking at in the flame pit. So about 20% of the active users there amount to more than 80% of the posts in that forum.

[Death BOO Z]

aren't most of those private messages related to the picture contest we had last month?

another question... let's see...

how about cutting in down to the days of the week?
which day has the most posts? which forum only lives at weekend (one piece manga)?

also, how many members are responsible for making the top threads (say, above 200 posts?)

[Lucifus]

Good cold hard statistics. Comforting. Nice update cake.

Sign me up on the PSP browsing. Also from my desktop, notebook, and various school rigs.

I never really log in usually save for when I'm on my desktop however.

[Buffalobiian]

68% of our visitors are running firefox, with ie holding about a 20% market share. Opera and Chrome are in third and fourth with 5% and 3.5% respectively, and safari's down at 1.5%

About this, is it worked out per page request, or per IP? I was just thinking that a user constantly here on FF could skew the data when more people may be lightly browsing on IE, for and extreme example.

[RyougaZell]

Personally I use firefox at home, yet I use IE at work because or systems aren't compatible with firefox (crappy shit).

I am also curious to see 'spent' time a day of users. Again... not who... just know how many spend how many hours a day browsing (*looks guiltily at how many times he logs a day to lurk*)

[complich8]

how about cutting in down to the days of the week?
which day has the most posts? which forum only lives at weekend (one piece manga)?

also, how many members are responsible for making the top threads (say, above 200 posts?)

breakdowns by day are less interesting, because it tends to be maybe a 10-15% uptick on weekends. It's also kind of a pain in the ass to do. And the "forum only lives at weekend" ... if you already know the answer, why are you asking? :p

That last one might be interesting, though. I'll think about it...


About this, is it worked out per page request, or per IP? I was just thinking that a user constantly here on FF could skew the data when more people may be lightly browsing on IE, for and extreme example.

That's per visitor. So if you show up and look at the /index.php, you're weighted the same as if you spend all week here visiting a page every 5 minutes. However, it doesn't include people who don't run the scripts, so if you're noscripting google-analytics or if you're a search engine spidering the site, you don't count.


Personally I use firefox at home, yet I use IE at work because or systems aren't compatible with firefox (crappy shit).

I am also curious to see 'spent' time a day of users. Again... not who... just know how many spend how many hours a day browsing (*looks guiltily at how many times he logs a day to lurk*)

Don't have enough data to generate those stats (since I throw away webserver logs after like 2 weeks), but if you're lurking all the time you can pay attention to the "Currently Active Users" box on the forum index and maybe notice some trends. Not too many people run invisible...

[masamuneehs]

was wondering, how much traffic do the gallery pages get? i know they're not very active any more, but, just curious.

i always enjoy reading these stats... god knows i'm a dork...

also, any way to tell what "year" of posters post in which sections? like are 2004 members more likely to be found in the Naruto Manga forum, General Discussion, or what?

[complich8]

Last month, the gallery had 12598 unique pageviews, out of 209,000 unique pageviews on the forums as a whole. So ... it's not like it's unpopular, but it's not where people spend their time.

That other thing ... yeah, I can do that, I think.



+--------------------------------------------------------+------+-----------+
| forumname | year | usercount |
+--------------------------------------------------------+------+-----------+
| Anime Fanart | 2003 | 8 |
| Anime Fanart | 2004 | 11 |
| Anime Fanart | 2005 | 18 |
| Anime Fanart | 2006 | 10 |
| Anime Fanart | 2007 | 7 |
| Anime Fanart | 2008 | 12 |
| Anime Fanart | 2009 | 1 |
| Announcements | 2003 | 1 |
| Announcements | 2005 | 3 |
| Announcements | 2006 | 1 |
| Bleach | 2003 | 16 |
| Bleach | 2004 | 19 |
| Bleach | 2005 | 30 |
| Bleach | 2006 | 13 |
| Bleach | 2007 | 10 |
| Bleach | 2008 | 24 |
| Bleach | 2009 | 1 |
| Bleach Manga | 2003 | 19 |
| Bleach Manga | 2004 | 16 |
| Bleach Manga | 2005 | 22 |
| Bleach Manga | 2006 | 10 |
| Bleach Manga | 2007 | 12 |
| Bleach Manga | 2008 | 15 |
| Bleach Manga | 2009 | 2 |
| Books and Manga | 2003 | 21 |
| Books and Manga | 2004 | 12 |
| Books and Manga | 2005 | 23 |
| Books and Manga | 2006 | 15 |
| Books and Manga | 2007 | 11 |
| Books and Manga | 2008 | 15 |
| Books and Manga | 2009 | 1 |
| Downloads | 2003 | 7 |
| Downloads | 2004 | 9 |
| Downloads | 2005 | 15 |
| Downloads | 2006 | 9 |
| Downloads | 2007 | 4 |
| Downloads | 2008 | 19 |
| General Anime | 2003 | 29 |
| General Anime | 2004 | 25 |
| General Anime | 2005 | 49 |
| General Anime | 2006 | 30 |
| General Anime | 2007 | 27 |
| General Anime | 2008 | 57 |
| General Anime | 2009 | 1 |
| General Discussion | 2003 | 32 |
| General Discussion | 2004 | 26 |
| General Discussion | 2005 | 43 |
| General Discussion | 2006 | 19 |
| General Discussion | 2007 | 12 |
| General Discussion | 2008 | 47 |
| General Discussion | 2009 | 4 |
| General Support | 2003 | 18 |
| General Support | 2004 | 16 |
| General Support | 2005 | 19 |
| General Support | 2006 | 10 |
| General Support | 2007 | 5 |
| General Support | 2008 | 18 |
| GW Suggestions | 2003 | 11 |
| GW Suggestions | 2004 | 6 |
| GW Suggestions | 2005 | 15 |
| GW Suggestions | 2006 | 8 |
| GW Suggestions | 2007 | 4 |
| GW Suggestions | 2008 | 10 |
| GW Suggestions | 2009 | 1 |
| Mobile Suit Gundam | 2003 | 10 |
| Mobile Suit Gundam | 2004 | 14 |
| Mobile Suit Gundam | 2005 | 29 |
| Mobile Suit Gundam | 2006 | 7 |
| Mobile Suit Gundam | 2007 | 5 |
| Mobile Suit Gundam | 2008 | 8 |
| Mobile Suit Gundam | 2009 | 1 |
| Movies and TV | 2003 | 19 |
| Movies and TV | 2004 | 19 |
| Movies and TV | 2005 | 31 |
| Movies and TV | 2006 | 14 |
| Movies and TV | 2007 | 8 |
| Movies and TV | 2008 | 22 |
| Movies and TV | 2009 | 1 |
| Naruto | 2003 | 26 |
| Naruto | 2004 | 29 |
| Naruto | 2005 | 40 |
| Naruto | 2006 | 19 |
| Naruto | 2007 | 19 |
| Naruto | 2008 | 42 |
| Naruto | 2009 | 3 |
| Naruto Manga/Open Discussion | 2003 | 31 |
| Naruto Manga/Open Discussion | 2004 | 25 |
| Naruto Manga/Open Discussion | 2005 | 35 |
| Naruto Manga/Open Discussion | 2006 | 17 |
| Naruto Manga/Open Discussion | 2007 | 19 |
| Naruto Manga/Open Discussion | 2008 | 31 |
| Naruto Manga/Open Discussion | 2009 | 1 |
| One Piece | 2003 | 11 |
| One Piece | 2004 | 9 |
| One Piece | 2005 | 13 |
| One Piece | 2006 | 6 |
| One Piece | 2007 | 7 |
| One Piece | 2008 | 10 |
| One Piece | 2009 | 1 |
| One Piece Manga and Open Discussion | 2003 | 14 |
| One Piece Manga and Open Discussion | 2004 | 6 |
| One Piece Manga and Open Discussion | 2005 | 9 |
| One Piece Manga and Open Discussion | 2006 | 9 |
| One Piece Manga and Open Discussion | 2007 | 3 |
| One Piece Manga and Open Discussion | 2008 | 9 |
| One Piece Manga and Open Discussion | 2009 | 1 |
| Series En Fuego: Soul Eater and Toaru Majutsu no Index | 2003 | 12 |
| Series En Fuego: Soul Eater and Toaru Majutsu no Index | 2004 | 6 |
| Series En Fuego: Soul Eater and Toaru Majutsu no Index | 2005 | 17 |
| Series En Fuego: Soul Eater and Toaru Majutsu no Index | 2006 | 10 |
| Series En Fuego: Soul Eater and Toaru Majutsu no Index | 2007 | 10 |
| Series En Fuego: Soul Eater and Toaru Majutsu no Index | 2008 | 11 |
| The Flaming Pit | 2003 | 16 |
| The Flaming Pit | 2004 | 17 |
| The Flaming Pit | 2005 | 22 |
| The Flaming Pit | 2006 | 13 |
| The Flaming Pit | 2007 | 10 |
| The Flaming Pit | 2008 | 21 |
| The Flaming Pit | 2009 | 1 |
+--------------------------------------------------------+------+-----------+

[XanBcoo]

What's up with us 2005s? We seem to take the majority in everything.

Reprezent :cool:

[RyougaZell]

With this numbers I've just realized something... I've been posting on this forums (with a slight break at the beginning) for over 4 years... wow...

[Archangel]

Now that you mentioned it, i'll have my gotwoot birthday in 2 days O_o

[IFHTT]

I wonder how much the stats collected by google-analytics are skewed by people utilizing script-blocking? I'm sure quite a lot of people have whitelisted the google-analytics domain, but I know I for one have always just kept it blacklisted for no particular reason.

[Paulyboy]

I could add that i'm one of the few who browses on the PS3 :)


AHAHAH! I have done that a couple of times, I will post when needs be other than that I lurk from time to time.

[RyougaZell]

Can we have a query seeing how many hours a month I spend on Gotwoot? Lol...

[Buffalobiian]

Can we have another dose Comp? :D

[rockmanj]

Yea, it was pretty interesting...And I just noticed I have been posting here damn near 7 years! I feel old.

[darkshadow]

That's only because you ARE old ;P.

[rockmanj]

That's only because you ARE old ;P.

Almost 2 years more than you isn't that bad...you'll be up here soon enough.

[darkshadow]

I know... ;[

[complich8]

You'll get an updated statistics run after I resolve some of the more pressing template kinks. For now, here's a depressing layout-breaker graph I made the other day:

http://forums.gotwoot.net/gallery/files/3/1/2/Gotwoot_Posts_Per_Day_3-21-10_original.png

I do that sometimes. Make graphs, charts, do sql queries. You know ...

[Archangel]

Depressing indeed