As is customary and traditional, we celebrate every new 1,000 members here. We're now at 17,000 registered members. This site currently does nearly 40,000 page views a day, and around 1 million page views per month. Growth continues at nearly 100% annually. Thanks to everyone who makes this such a thriving community!
Chris, yes, certainly this community is about amateur UAVs on the whole, not only for APM users, however it's also a home website for APM and I was wondering what is the ratio between the number of members here and APM owners.
Bernard, that is a good point and very much part of the mission of DIY Drones. That's why we devoted one of the tabs above to "Getting Started" and most of the links in the box at the top of the page are getting started tutorials for newbies.
It's one of the things single-focus social network like this can do that's harder for general-purpose discussion boards like RC Groups or generic social networks like Facebook. In those others, newbies typically walk into a discussion that's been going on for ages, and it's hard to come up to speed. But we can put static tutorial content in a place that's easy to find, while still giving prominence to the more sophisticated discussion of long-timers.
After reading the previous comment I'am beginning to wonder what will happen with all the growing number of newbies.
Having an experienced technical ground community is good but, the strategy to interest and get DIY newcombers active as soon as possible should be looked at. I understand that before getting involved, previous flying experience is best but ... what about all the others? and theres a lot of them.
I am the co-founder of a public institution that gets school's drop-out back to complete there studies. We did it by including technology in there path. Some of us think that DIY (Drones) is the most exciting, accessible and stimulating technology to be use as a new motivation insentive. Among us, some serious consideration is beeing done about this for the benefits of drop-outs.
So, in a nut shell, there should be some toughts about representing newbies in the actual general approche and get them to speed ...
@Eric St-Denis I have futaba 6EX and I just use mixing on channels to get a 3 toggle switch which is good enough to use with APM, I just use manual, FBW, and Auto most of the time, which is good enough to use with APM, as these are the modes I use the most.
Kirill, it's in the thousands, but this community is not just for APM users! It's for all things about amateur UAVs, on any platform. We have a slight tilt towards open source technology, but other than that it's should be about the users, not any specific products.
Krzys: Actually, pages/visit has been remarkable steady over the years. As the site got bigger, the numbers got less noisy, but they've remained constant at around 3.2. That, BTW, is excellent and reflects the "sticky" nature of a social network. Most news sites have a 1.2 page/visit ratio, so our community focus really helps us there.
Here's the data, going back to Aug 2007 (ignore that analytics glitch for a month last year):
Dany, the stats are pretty constant: an average of 4 blog posts and 14-16 discussion forum posts per day. The "meat" of the site is the blog posts, which are moderated and meant to be news and information of interest to the entire community. This shows up in the RSS feed, so we try to keep that between 4-6 a day, to avoid flooding anybody's news stream.
The discussion forums posts ebb and flow depending on the state of hardware and software. If we push out a new beta that has a bug, we'll get a ton of forum posts about this, then once we eliminate the bug in the next version, that will die down. Same if we release a new hardware version of have a production issue with a batch of boards. Discussion forum posts are not moderated, so they tend to be of more varying quality.
In general, the discussion forum is for questions and help. The blog posts are for news and information. Blog posts have to start with a picture or video; discussion forum posts can be plain text.
Comments
It's one of the things single-focus social network like this can do that's harder for general-purpose discussion boards like RC Groups or generic social networks like Facebook. In those others, newbies typically walk into a discussion that's been going on for ages, and it's hard to come up to speed. But we can put static tutorial content in a place that's easy to find, while still giving prominence to the more sophisticated discussion of long-timers.
After reading the previous comment I'am beginning to wonder what will happen with all the growing number of newbies.
Having an experienced technical ground community is good but, the strategy to interest and get DIY newcombers active as soon as possible should be looked at. I understand that before getting involved, previous flying experience is best but ... what about all the others? and theres a lot of them.
I am the co-founder of a public institution that gets school's drop-out back to complete there studies. We did it by including technology in there path. Some of us think that DIY (Drones) is the most exciting, accessible and stimulating technology to be use as a new motivation insentive. Among us, some serious consideration is beeing done about this for the benefits of drop-outs.
So, in a nut shell, there should be some toughts about representing newbies in the actual general approche and get them to speed ...
@Eric St-Denis I have futaba 6EX and I just use mixing on channels to get a 3 toggle switch which is good enough to use with APM, I just use manual, FBW, and Auto most of the time, which is good enough to use with APM, as these are the modes I use the most.
If you need help setting it up just let me know
Very good, I started to believe something is going south.
So this is not meaning the readers are becoming superficial clickers.
Very good news.
Krzys: Actually, pages/visit has been remarkable steady over the years. As the site got bigger, the numbers got less noisy, but they've remained constant at around 3.2. That, BTW, is excellent and reflects the "sticky" nature of a social network. Most news sites have a 1.2 page/visit ratio, so our community focus really helps us there.
Here's the data, going back to Aug 2007 (ignore that analytics glitch for a month last year):
Dany, the stats are pretty constant: an average of 4 blog posts and 14-16 discussion forum posts per day. The "meat" of the site is the blog posts, which are moderated and meant to be news and information of interest to the entire community. This shows up in the RSS feed, so we try to keep that between 4-6 a day, to avoid flooding anybody's news stream.
The discussion forums posts ebb and flow depending on the state of hardware and software. If we push out a new beta that has a bug, we'll get a ton of forum posts about this, then once we eliminate the bug in the next version, that will die down. Same if we release a new hardware version of have a production issue with a batch of boards. Discussion forum posts are not moderated, so they tend to be of more varying quality.
In general, the discussion forum is for questions and help. The blog posts are for news and information. Blog posts have to start with a picture or video; discussion forum posts can be plain text.
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