Dave
Staff member
Okay, before you go into a big tizzy I'm not going anywhere and neither is HF. So this is not an "OMFG WE'RE DYING!!!" post. In fact, we're doing pretty well. But this is going to be a pretty long post so if you want to go directly to the tl;dr portion feel free.
I started this thread because it has been noted that it SEEMS that we are lowing down. I noticed it, too. But when I go over the numbers it shows quite the opposite. So since a lot of us are numbers geeks I'm going to post some stats here to show what's been going on, then talk about the future of the site as I've got some pretty important announcements.
First the statistics. I went to Google Analytics to see how traffic fared. Here's the traffic for the month of September of 2010 as compared to 2009. This shows the number of visits.
As you can see, other than a brief time around the 15th (what the hell was THAT about?!?) we have been consistently higher than we were.
But so what, right? If Dave goes here 5 times that's 5 visits. What about unique visitors? Still up by a lot. Please note that this next graphic is UNIQUE VISITORS. So if Dave visits 5 times it counts as 1 visitor.
We're hitting over 1000 unique visitors every day. LURKER POWER ACTIVATE!!
To get a little more into the nuts and bolts of it...
The ONLY metric we are down on is time on site. People are spending only 9 minutes 19 seconds on average now whereas before they were spending 11 minutes 29 seconds. Part of this is my fault and I'll be addressing this in the future portion.
But Dave, you say, it only feels like we've been slowing down RECENTLY! Okay, let's look at September 2010 against a more current time like...April 2010.
As you can see, we're still up. Maybe it's not as much but we are still growing. Expanded stats agree with this.
So there you have it. We're still good. I'm still here, still doing my best to keep things moving and not planning on stopping any time soon.
And speaking of the future, here's where things get a tad murky.
As you all are aware, Ame has put a metric fuckton of work into making this place work. But vBulletin is just fucking terrible to work with. The backend of vBulletin is a fucking mess and a half and if it weren't for Ame this place would look like a cobbled together sack of rancid dogcrap. But as you are also aware, Ame is going through some changes in her own life that require her undivided attention. For her own mental well-being Ame will be no longer an Admin of Halforums. She's agreed to stay on to help get some things in the site unmessed and then she'll be taking her leave. She needs to do this and we all should support her, wish her well and hope everything works out. Her leaving has NOTHING to do with Halforums...except maybe the amount of time she spent coding when she should have been sleeping and taking care of herself. I can't tell you how much we'll all miss her!
But her leaving brings up a particularly nasty issue - I can't do what she does. At all. And since vBulletin is pulling some of their shit again we have some decisions.
We've talked about this at length in the Mod only forum, but vBulletin is talking about releasing version v4.1 (we're currently at v4.06). This new version has "massive changes to the code" which means everything will break - again. Do we have to change? No. But Ame right now can NOT work on the css of the site because vBulletin's back-end is so jacked up. So we have a choice to make. Stay as we are with no chance of any changes or migrate to v4.1 and hope they fixed what was severely broken in v4.0x. And after THAT gets released we put up with v4.1x every month for security reasons and then v5 is coming out and that would require us to buy a whole new license AGAIN.
Add in the fact that vBulletin just got bought out by a venture capital group that says they want to streamline and, well, a lot of people are unsure about the future of vBulletin.
And then we found something called XenForo.
A little while ago the two guys who had created vBulletin (and were then bought out and forced out the door) got together and created a new forum software called XenForo. They went at this from a USER perspective instead of from an ADMIN perspective.
Here's a few videos about XenForo and how some stuff works.
Thread Views
Jumping to quoted posts
Quick Navigation Menu
Adding Pictures to Post
Reporting a Post - Note that after the initial report it deals more with Admin/Mod stuff
Surfing Visible/Invisible and a brief look at profiles
Multi-Quote built in
There are others. XenForo goes on sale tomorrow. I'm going to buy a license and Ame is going to play with it and see what she can do. Biggest thing is XenForo is simple to use and friendly to everyone. Even I can use it, which is a big thing.
tl:dr version:
Stats look good.
Ame is leaving us for personal reasons.
vBulletin sucks.
May very well be moving to XenForo forum software.
---------- Post added at 11:01 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:00 AM ----------
Member Card (I forgot this one)
I started this thread because it has been noted that it SEEMS that we are lowing down. I noticed it, too. But when I go over the numbers it shows quite the opposite. So since a lot of us are numbers geeks I'm going to post some stats here to show what's been going on, then talk about the future of the site as I've got some pretty important announcements.
First the statistics. I went to Google Analytics to see how traffic fared. Here's the traffic for the month of September of 2010 as compared to 2009. This shows the number of visits.
As you can see, other than a brief time around the 15th (what the hell was THAT about?!?) we have been consistently higher than we were.
But so what, right? If Dave goes here 5 times that's 5 visits. What about unique visitors? Still up by a lot. Please note that this next graphic is UNIQUE VISITORS. So if Dave visits 5 times it counts as 1 visitor.
We're hitting over 1000 unique visitors every day. LURKER POWER ACTIVATE!!
To get a little more into the nuts and bolts of it...
The ONLY metric we are down on is time on site. People are spending only 9 minutes 19 seconds on average now whereas before they were spending 11 minutes 29 seconds. Part of this is my fault and I'll be addressing this in the future portion.
But Dave, you say, it only feels like we've been slowing down RECENTLY! Okay, let's look at September 2010 against a more current time like...April 2010.
As you can see, we're still up. Maybe it's not as much but we are still growing. Expanded stats agree with this.
So there you have it. We're still good. I'm still here, still doing my best to keep things moving and not planning on stopping any time soon.
And speaking of the future, here's where things get a tad murky.
As you all are aware, Ame has put a metric fuckton of work into making this place work. But vBulletin is just fucking terrible to work with. The backend of vBulletin is a fucking mess and a half and if it weren't for Ame this place would look like a cobbled together sack of rancid dogcrap. But as you are also aware, Ame is going through some changes in her own life that require her undivided attention. For her own mental well-being Ame will be no longer an Admin of Halforums. She's agreed to stay on to help get some things in the site unmessed and then she'll be taking her leave. She needs to do this and we all should support her, wish her well and hope everything works out. Her leaving has NOTHING to do with Halforums...except maybe the amount of time she spent coding when she should have been sleeping and taking care of herself. I can't tell you how much we'll all miss her!
But her leaving brings up a particularly nasty issue - I can't do what she does. At all. And since vBulletin is pulling some of their shit again we have some decisions.
We've talked about this at length in the Mod only forum, but vBulletin is talking about releasing version v4.1 (we're currently at v4.06). This new version has "massive changes to the code" which means everything will break - again. Do we have to change? No. But Ame right now can NOT work on the css of the site because vBulletin's back-end is so jacked up. So we have a choice to make. Stay as we are with no chance of any changes or migrate to v4.1 and hope they fixed what was severely broken in v4.0x. And after THAT gets released we put up with v4.1x every month for security reasons and then v5 is coming out and that would require us to buy a whole new license AGAIN.
Add in the fact that vBulletin just got bought out by a venture capital group that says they want to streamline and, well, a lot of people are unsure about the future of vBulletin.
And then we found something called XenForo.
A little while ago the two guys who had created vBulletin (and were then bought out and forced out the door) got together and created a new forum software called XenForo. They went at this from a USER perspective instead of from an ADMIN perspective.
Here's a few videos about XenForo and how some stuff works.
Thread Views
Jumping to quoted posts
Quick Navigation Menu
Adding Pictures to Post
Reporting a Post - Note that after the initial report it deals more with Admin/Mod stuff
Surfing Visible/Invisible and a brief look at profiles
Multi-Quote built in
There are others. XenForo goes on sale tomorrow. I'm going to buy a license and Ame is going to play with it and see what she can do. Biggest thing is XenForo is simple to use and friendly to everyone. Even I can use it, which is a big thing.
tl:dr version:
Stats look good.
Ame is leaving us for personal reasons.
vBulletin sucks.
May very well be moving to XenForo forum software.
---------- Post added at 11:01 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:00 AM ----------
Member Card (I forgot this one)
eace:
