Usage Stats: Is There Activity Variation in Forums?

[robphy]

Are there any usage statistics available?
I'm relatively new here.

Is there more reading and posting activity in particular forums during certain periods of time (say, on daily, weekly, or monthly time-scales)?

For example, I can imagine that "homework help" activity goes up during the academic year but probably dies down in the summer. Can something be said of other forums?

 

[chroot]

The site does collect usage statistics that are available to mentors and admins -- perhaps those statistics can be made available for all users to see. I'm frankly not sure, but I will look into it. The basic statistic viewer's highest granularity is per-day, so I can't see hourly statistics directly through the vBulletin software. I'm sure there are some modifications available that will show smaller granularity though, since the information is stored in the database and must just be queried.

There are definitely peaks in the activity during certain times of the day. The majority of our members are American, so early morning and afternoon tend to be the most active times. Weekends, particularly Sundays, also seem to be high activity days.

- Warren

 

[sol2]

A calculation of "replies/views" serves as a good indicator

The calculation of hits to site are a good indicator of whether advertising will pay off, to off set cost incurred from cost of space on server. 10000 hits per mth is a start, but you have to target for a lot more for this to pay off.

http://www.burstmedia.com/ is one advertising outfit that can pay off with a high number of hits to your site. The banner ads are what are being show here in Physics forum. They won't consider you unless your hits are very high.

The Ads Google is another that pays out on the number of times the ad is hit on.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

There are several statistics hacks we could install. However they require more tables to be inserted on our database which we try to optimize and keep as clean as possible. So unless we find or create a hack that analyzes data straight from our exisiting database and log files we won't likely make anything public. But chroot does give the general pattern of activity accurately.