It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 79,000!
Despite the site being on-and-off down for nearly a week over the past two month as you can see on the right side of the traffic graph above (the fault of Ning, our hosting provider -- you can see the sorry story of their tech issues here), we still had more than a million page views this month.
We've known we were going to have to eventually going to shift off Ning, but it looks like the time is now. I'm been evaluating Jamroom, which has a special service to migrate Ning networks, and so far it looks good. Anybody have experience with Jamroom and would like to help with the migration?
Comments
exactly @Craig Issod. Whatever platform gets chosen ideally should be highly adaptable to the ever-changing cultural and technological environments of websites and the web user relation.
RCG is on VBB - a forum sw. The three biggies in the end of things are Xenforo, VBB and IPS.
They have evolved into more than just forums with both OEM and 3rd party add-ons.
Sites like RCG have been customized over the years quite a bit.
Whether for better or worse, DIY and experimentation are a much smaller percentage of the market than before - the overall market has grown many times over while many DIY sites and vendors have languished.
Gary - yes, that's a nice way to put it. Reorientation - looking forward as opposed to back. Stats have to be studied carefully to see how many people are actually in the core community and what they are doing. A lot of very large sites, including my older one, are often curated by a couple dozen (or couple hundred) very active members. Page views are very often not from members but from the public landing from search engines.
Lots of stuff to be considered to make a successful move and reorientation.
I do notice that a lot of the news and announcements (here and in almost countless other sites) are just cut and pastes (and.or links) to the same stories...a giant echo chamber exists now whereas back when DIY would probably be one of only a couple sites publishing such stuff.
It seems like vast numbers of drone sites have started up in the past year or two - that also makes it harder to keep traffic up at any single site.
I just noticed Chris,
Looking at your graph of page views, aside from the 2 outages you highlight, there appears to be starting in May a reduction in views from more than 40,000 to possibly a bit less than 30,000 per day.
Is this related to Ning problems or to the separation of 3DR from the DIYD community, perhaps?
I suspect the later, possibly combined with Ardupilot developers also now setting up a separate developers site.
But it does point out a reality that to retain it's value, this site is going to need to provide at least as much functionality or value as it did originally.
Or did you have any specific thoughts or intentions regarding reorientation?
Just a thought,
Gary
Right, I am full throttle for rich media.
Some features that might be interesting to benchmark from RCGroups are
- the extraorinary handy subscribe panel : the way you categorize threads,subforum&blogs
- the markers that send you to first post unread or to last post
- the speed of the server
Also latest vBulletins feature notifications when you are quoted, or mentioned (@SomeDude).
Looking forward to seing this project finished, however take your time :)
Maxime: That's a custom CMS (so not available to others), but really forums only. If I had to lean one way or another, I'd lean more towards rich media (video, photos, text) rather than just another text forum.
Hello,
How expansive is th RCGroups CMS? I basically found no better on the web :)
@John: Yeah, but there's no easy way to quote, you have to copy paste. And that doesn't fix the previous replies. If you now go to a thread, like the Pixracer one, you hardly understand who is replying to who.
Also it will break my usage of the Activity page if everyone starts every post with a quote - but this a little secondary.
P.S.: After finishing this text I found out that when pressing Reply to an individual it inserts the quote automatically.
Thanks Chris.
@Francisco, just use normal forum etiquette. If you are replying directly below someone's post just referrer by name. And if there are many posts in between, quote the comment you are replying to.
I also hated the threaded view but the flat view is worse because now you don't know who people are responding to. If it had a link to the post the person was answering or if it showed a quote it would be OK, but without that it gets even worse to follow anything.
The way I keep up over here is to use the mobile webpage for Activity - yes, the mobile webpage, the desktop version doesn't have a good Activity page, just a tiny widget on the homepage, on which you have to keep pressing the More button.
And +1 for the chronological reply to.
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