Forum getting too popular?

[Cerebus]

• Looks like starting at Feb this year, there is a significant increase in new forum members, not sure if its spammer account like in the past. 

I'll have to investigate that, smells fishy.
Hackaday has bugger all effect these days.

That got written up in The Register too.

You'll get some sort of read on the effect someone like The Reg or Hackaday has by the referrer headers.

[BravoV]

Data up to 16th July ...

Not much to conclude imo, like voltage regulator, the output seems to stabilize without any spikes and with stabilized ripple. 

One exception is, the Page Views, for the last 3 months, it keeps hitting the ceiling and grows quite significantly.

Curious if this has anything to do with recent weird and intermittent "502 Bad Gateway" that this forum is experiencing ? 

Other interpretation is yours.

[BravoV]

Up to 24th Oct 2017 yesterday.

The forum's page view is hitting 1 Million Views, and the video channel is at 100 Million Views, what a nice rounded numbers on both.

Congratulation Dave. 

[BravoV]

Update up to 27th Jan 2018.

- Looks like its stabilizing for almost 3 years now, on average at 40-50 new topics and 700-800 new posts per day.

- As page view was reaching new height Oct 2017 (1 Million views), but as previous periods, every times when near end of year, it dropped again, probably holiday season. The difference is, now this end of year fluctuation pattern is significantly amplified, say compared to like the period of Dec 2016 to Jan 2017.

Other interpretation is yours.

[chickenHeadKnob]

Another Keysight scope month is nearing, if Dave is going to run a concurrent give-away contest watch the number of transients  explode again.

[BravoV]

Another Keysight scope month is nearing, if Dave is going to run a concurrent give-away contest watch the number of transients  explode again.

Also as with the upcoming Dave's scopes giveaway ends at this mid of March, as now I think we can see new faces are popping out. It will be interesting to watch at the chart, will update once the event completed.

[BravoV]

Until they leave they are new members. It does make the stats more interesting. I don't see a downside.

Active users rarely left, usually they (the dormant ones) were booted by Dave on minimum post count purging.

[rodcastler]

Of the forums I'm subscribed to, I have not seen one with this level of activity (2,000+ users online? c'mon).

The undesirable phenomenon I found under this cirumstance is that you may post something and your post cascades down so quickly on the list that chances to get a reply reduce substantially unless it's a very popular trend topic.

That being said, I'm glad electronics has so much traction and I'm a believer in Dave being a game changer for bringing new enthusiasts to the electronics community in general and not to mention this: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/how-much-has-eevblog-cost-you/

[BravoV]

Update up to 23th Mar 2018.

Starting from last year, new members are showing a steady growth, and now its almost > 100 new members per day. Also the Online Users is growing constantly too. Current server relocation from HG hopefully is inline with the forum's growth.
Click to enlarge.




Regarding recent March scopes giveaway, it looks like it didn't affect the forum too much like the old contests did, the zoomed version starting from Nov 2016 until yesterday for better clarity.

[xrunner]

Oh I gave up trying to keep up with it all a long time ago. I do post some repair threads from time-to-time and look at the beginners area to see if I can help anyone (most of the time someone else has already beat me to it), and the TEA thread, but no - it's a Monster I can't keep up with.

[BravoV]

Oh I gave up trying to keep up with it all a long time ago. I do post some repair threads from time-to-time and look at the beginners area to see if I can help anyone, and the TEA thread, but no - it's a Monster I can't keep up with.

Yeah, especially its reaching almost 1K posts/day.

[BravoV]

Up to 13th July 2018 yesterday.

Not much in fluctuations, actually its like control loop in power supply, most are stabilized with expected ripple, no major surprising spikes. 

For new forum new members, it shows a steady organically growth since last year.

Other interpretations are yours.

[tautech]

Is it just me or have others noticed an increase in female members where once IIRC we were running at 30+:1 whereas now we're at ~16:1.
That's a great stat and welcome aboard girls. 

[djos]

Is it just me or have others noticed an increase in female members where once IIRC we were running at 30+:1 whereas now we're at ~16:1.
That's a great stat and welcome aboard girls. 

That is good, I'm hoping my little girl will be and engineer of some description, she's showing signs of high IQ and great lateral thinking at 7, she's much better at mathematics than I was at that age too (not a high bar tho). Personally I'm hoping she puts me in the shade and has a great career doing whatever she fancies.

[StillTrying]

Does the male to female ratio only apply to today's registrations? I think it varies much too wildly to apply to the total number of members.

[rhb]

I won't pretend to understand how it happened, but the EEVblog forum is the closest I've seen to Usenet in the late 80's and early 90's.  Naturally there are some nut jobs, but the number and proportion of intelligent, well educated and pleasant people is quite amazing.  Interestingly, the pompous "experts" seem to get bored and wander off after a relatively short period of time.

Oh, and Dave, I'd classify your public persona as borderline nut job.  But many thanks for what you have done.

I gave up my personal technical life to look after my aging parents, both now deceased.  I was going out of my mind from isolation until I discovered the EEVblog forum.  So I *really* appreciate it.

[Mr. Scram]

Fraid not, the Findchips search bar is a fixed price.
BTW that search bar might be changing soon to actual content ads (also from Supply Frame/FindChips), they want to try something different.

Dave.

I hope you will consider refraining from going the route that's common now, with automatically traded and externally hosted ads with dynamic content and client side code. I've always felt your approach of self hosted static ads is refreshingly pleasant.

[tautech]

Does the male to female ratio only apply to today's registrations? I think it varies much too wildly to apply to the total number of members.

You must be right as yesterday it was 15.9:1 and today it's 20.5:1 ! 

Unless Dave sees other stats this seems like piss poor info for the owner of a forum. 
You'd expect he could see the daily stats and we see the overall historical ones. 
Another SMF fail ?

[StillTrying]

The personal Most Popular Boards By Activity stats don't make a lot of sense.

If there was a very unpopular board where only 2 users had only ever visited just once and posted just once, it would be stuck at the top of their most popular boards forever because 50% of the posts on that board were theirs!  RF, Microwave, HAM Radio used to be stuck at the top of my list.

Most Popular Boards By Activity
Dodgy Technology  39 of 2851 posts (1.37%)
Jobs  5 of 1389 posts (0.36%)
Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff   350 of 220598 posts (0.16%)
Beginners  309 of 221339 posts (0.14%)
EEVblog Specific   78 of 76367 posts (0.10%)
Repair  59 of 70107 posts (0.08%)

[BravoV]

New topics & posts are stabilized nicely, so do online viewers and page views, but new members are sky rocketing, are spammers account strike back again Dave ?

[EEVblog]

New topics & posts are stabilized nicely, so do online viewers and page views, but new members are sky rocketing, are spammers account strike back again Dave ?

Seems to be a lot lately that sneak through. Most caught in the spam trap though. Currently 5000 members awaiting approval! I bulk delete them every few weeks.
Just checked and there are 82 pages of accounts with zero posts and not online since 1st Oct. Time to mass delete.

[Bicurico]

How about being able to select desired forums and have a link to show unread posts on those selected forums only?

Regards,
Vitor

[Housedad]

Google must have its eye on eevblog.  They are checking their lists twice and then being naughty, not nice by selling the traffic info indiscriminately to anyone at all. 

Spam will be the end of the internet someday.  It will be a wasteland like Earth after the Buy n Large Corporation got done with it in the movie Wall-E.

[rhb]

How about being able to select desired forums and have a link to show unread posts on those selected forums only?

Regards,
Vitor

This would be a nice feature.  I'd thought the same thing when I missed a day and there were 15 pages of unread posts since my last visit.

As for google.  It's very simple.  They track which links people choose and that increases the ranking.

While I don't think the forum can be too popular, it is going to outgrow the current platform at this rate, so we really do need to look for a replacement that will scale to more users.  The online numbers are skewed by people like me who keep a tab open 24x7.

[BravoV]

Nothing special, quite flat & stable, even the latest scope give away contest looks like didn't make any significant spike or ripple. 

Average about 800 posts/day and 50 new threads/day. 

The rest of the interpretation is yours.