Thought it would be interesting to see the impact of his ban on postings and page views. Here is the raw data for the four months prior, and four months following: Month Page Views User Posts April 147,993 7,628 May 137,147 6,652 June 161,055 7,675 July 202,848 11,361 August 190,158 9,124 September 155,389 6,113 October 157,722 8,698 November 152,641 8,729 So what happens with Castle gone? Average page views are up 1.06%, but average posts are down 1.96% (163 posts per month). Unfortunately, I haven't figured out a good way to calculate how much of the net post change is the loss of his posts. I suspect he posts more than 163 times per month, which would mean that other users increased their posting after he left, but I have no single user level report data. I believe the page views statistic may demonstrate this -- more users interacting with the site means more page views than a single user would cause. The other flaw in this analysis is that I lack comparison data for the period in prior years. Maybe the pattern observed happens anyway, due to vacations and such.
He was banned back in August, no? Looks like it dropped quite a bit after he left. Plus, I doubt any one particular poster can affact the post counts that much, apart from if and when someone dies. and even that doesn't do much when hardly anyone checks in anymore and may not know for months or even years down the road.
July and August both had big numbers, but his ban was on August 3, so I think neither month is indicative of anything. I used four months on either side in order to get more of a long term trend. And the reason for four months, is that it is the length of the ban (roughly). As to your second point, we don't have enough data to figure it out. Maybe the posting graph for these 8 months looks the same in 2013, but we only have data back to November. I do believe, though, that one poster can definitely modify total post trends for good or for bad. This is one of the few opportunities we've had to test the idea, so I figured I'd take a look at the stats. What we have supports the possibility that he drives down visits by other users (note especially the page views data).
Our size is small enough and our traffic variable enough that it's hard to draw statistically significant conclusions from ... well, pretty much anything.
By the way, please let me know if there's anyone else who needs access to the Google Analytics account. Right now I'm pretty sure John and I are the only people on it.
It was decided back when you still ran the place to allow comments for a while after release and then lock them. Here: http://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/should-shelter-release-threads-be-locked.102405/
This thread has been open in totality less than a month. How many weeks was it open in here? Seems a little quick on the draw to be locking it. Also, I went and looked and JohnCastle had 198 posts..... IN THE LAST WEEK. So if posting only dropped 163 a month while he was gone, that does collaborate the page view increase trend. Less worthless spam brought more views and more worthwhile posts. Glad y'all brought him back to put an end to that trend before it got out of hand!
Make that 202 posts in the last week. In the 4 minutes I was looking that up and typing it out, he continued to spam up the the police thread babbling to himself about taxation being theft.
We're dealing with small quantities, which are very easily thrown off by fluke variations. If you took a dozen other people whose posting volume varies a lot and did the same comparison, you'd probably end up at the same conclusion for half of them, no matter who it was.
when I was admin at a different board, I LOVED to dig into the board analytics. It wasn't Google back then but the board software kept pretty extensive stats.
