Site stats for the year (2024) - until the end of November - "last night" as I write



The red line is the "important" one - and it's been rising since last winter. It's the number of posts made each month. Ordinarily, if I was promoting a website, I would welcome a steady climb.  Here, I am far from sure on that because there is some inverse correlation to be seen between post numbers and performance of GWR - in other words, one of the causes of more posts is a poor performance by the railway and (in my informed view) that is largely the case throughout this year.   

October had a surge in post numbers - and that was different; due to the extra posts of "Meet the Manager" amongst other things. So it's double amazing that November - and it's a shorter month too has risen even a tiny bit rather than dropped.

The blue line - number of new threads - is hard to see because of the scale on these axes.  That's good because it confirms that w have so many follow ups on the average thread - we're having ongoing conversations and here for good (as if you could doubt that) over so many years

The green and purple lines reveal the noise of the Internet and sites like ours over and above the planned / legitimate reasons we are here.  The green line is the number of people who ask to sign up each month.  They tend to be from far, far away from our area, not able to answer our security question, and reported many times by other forum operators to useful central databases for spamming.  We get a few genuine signups, but this line on the graph is not an indication of how well we are doing.   Similarly, the purple line shows the maximum number of different people (guests plus members) present (making requests for content) within any one 15 minute period. The surge to 4 times the normal level in July and August shows the loading imposed by a distributed denial of service attack (not aimed at us, I suspect, as other sites would have been effected in the same way) and this dropped away once I added code to separate the attacking visitors from the genuine ones and telling them to go away.   They never got to the level of actually denying service though - just slowed responses a bit.

I would be gobsmacked if December rose again ... planned engineering will cause far less immediate upset and far fewer posts that short notice changes - the record I believe is reporting a cancellation 9 minutes before it happened, even though it was clear to some that there was a problem much earlier.  The GWR policy of living in hope of a miracle of staffing on the day sure as heck keeps us busy.    Lets's hope that this Christmas, the three wise men bring not gold, frankincense and myrrh but train drivers, train managers, and class 175 (or 158 or 150)  trains.

 

Hmm.  I tend to post, just once, after I have merged some topics or posts within topics, simply to explain what I have done - purely out of courtesy to our members / readers.  

CfN. 

 

Minimal, Chris ... but ...

You may recall I celebrated my 8000th new thread a few days ago, and moved on a handful beyond there.   I'm noticing my number of created threads has slipped back, and at one point I wondered if I was going to have to celebrate an "8000th thread" all over again.   Saved, I think, by the 1844 railways act and Tintern Station!

 
+1 for each thread that you commented on after merging, I guess.

 
Thanks for those figures, grahame. 

Does my rather habitual practice of 'merging topics' (purely in the interests of continuity, clarity and ease of future reference ) have any impact on those statistics?

CfN. 

 
I am - astonished - that post and thread numbers are up again ... here are the stats (new thread and new posts) monthly for the last year:

 November 2023   117   926
 December 2023   144   1342
 January 2024   97   1153
 February 2024   61   815
 March 2024   101   917
 April 2024   83   725
 May 2024   72   946
 June 2024   97   1005
 July 2024   99   1187
 August 2024   118   1302
 September 2024   134   1389
 October 2024   165   1700

Not so amazing if you take a longer view, mind.

 

Indeed - and for a period we did online Zoom sessions to engage with members which perhaps diluted the posts a bit.    It's probably worth commenting too about the very early days - around 2008 - when we had a lot of members who I would describe as "train enthusiasts"; they were and remain very welcome, but they found more appropriate fora which headline the "train spotter" element rather than the "passenger forum" element. 

 
Coronavirus lockdown restrictions from March 2020 clearly had an impact - far fewer passengers travelling on trains and therefore less for them to post about. 

 

Yes - up in September and heading up in October too - here is a graph back to the year dot ...



Notable forum date - May 2014 we introduced "Like"s which means that quite a few "I agree" short posts were not made once it caught on.  Others welcome to pick out significant dates in rail and UK terms if you wish.

 

Looking at the "service" on offer today, I wouldn't be surprised if September sets new records too! 

 

And an astonishing August, up again to 1302 posts and yet without it being such an eventful month for the industry.  Busiest month yet this year. The utter unreliability of train services, especially at the weekend, "help"s though it is rather the sort of help we would prefer to do without.

 
Well over a year since I have posted on this thread ...  July 2024 was the busiest month on the Coffee Shop so far this year (measured in the number of posts) with 1187 posts. It exceeded 9 of the 12 month from last year too.   Hardly surprising that it was a busy month as it was eventful, with the General Election and a change of government on 4th / 5th,  King's Speech on 17th which announced the bill to "nationalise" the railway and set up GBR with a legal framework, and the cancellation within the last few days of "Restore Your Railway".   

Seventy members logged in during the month, out of 190 logged in year-so-far. Those figures are not directly comparable, but I would like to get some modernisation implemented to allow better viewing from phones and also to reduce the warnings people are given about us possibly being an insecure site - that warning dramatically reduces (devastates) new joiners.

Regular readers will know that July has been something of a washout for me (literally - with my old laptop getting unrecoverable water damage), and I have had to rebuild quite a bit.  I have re-establish a Facebook presence ( https://www.facebook.com/graham.ellis.melksham/ - forum members welcome back as friends and some of you have) and have updated my slumbering LinkedIn account at https://www.linkedin.com/in/wellho/ ... I have yet to re-establish some subsidiary pages and groups - not all will come back but some are there. I have not yet got back onto Twitter / X - never used it much, and early experiments to Pinterest, Instagram and TicToc have not even been on my list to look at.  I've probably got a YouTube channel I could bet back into. I'm also back at https://nextdoor.co.uk/profile/02ZxggpNJJj3qNTWT/ - nextdoor which is much more for local use.

I passed a milestone birthday during the month, and that gave Lisa and I the impetus to retune - no dramatic changes but I came to the reluctant conclusion that I've been disappointed with how little I've achieved as a Town Councillor, how little I've enjoyed it, and how much time I have wasted.  The public are lovely, and I have some good colleagues on the council and we have some excellent staff but that is a very carefully worded comment - read more at http://grahamellis.uk/blog1297.html if you like.  The irony of not taking part in the "beauty contest" and ego-boosting narcissistic activities of the council is that I have much more time for things I enjoy such as the Coffee Shop.

The last few day have brought a combined fuel (gas and electric) bill with 19 entries on one day, and email to a "Mr Wilson" which is not me,  five emails from a solicitor in Devizes as we are updating wills and powers of attorney,  death threats against councillors,  a good friend locally being crushed between two cars in a local car park (mentally she's there, physically it's a question of home adaption) and the possibly of a guest from Ukraine returning for a while to us in the UK, and that with complications.   Also I have been alerted that one of our servers will be discontinued at the end of August and I am busy porting email boxes and forwards and domain names.   Which brings me back to some of the comment made earlier about the state of the Coffee Shop.  MASSIVE thanks to the admin and moderator team here for being here, for helping and being such safe pairs of hands, and to members for making our club so welcoming.

 

Give me a month of Sundays ... though I suppose this month (with 3 bank holiday Mondays) is as close as I could get.

You HAVE given me a thought ... which I will put on the back burner for research until I have a chance; next few weeks are likely to be chaotic!

 


Do I recall that it's the case that there's no route to upgrade the site to offer responsive web design (so it's user-friendly on mobiles) short of ditching the current content and also member subscriptions? That might well boost the 'New members registering', but if it's at the dual costs of a mega-admin session falling on the shoulders of the few* - and also site amnesia that's not so good.

Mark

*One!

 
In two months time, the old Google Analytics data collection mechanism will be switched off ... and I need to find time if I can to see if I can work out and upgrade to the new system.  I probably can, but with a month just ended it seemed like a sensible time to look back and see how we have been doing recently before I start doing things that may results in glitches in data collection.  Here is a staring point:


Taking the Google Analytic graphic from December 2020 and putting it alongside the April 2023 graphic:



Sadly, Google uses different scales - no overall easy conclusion even though it looks like we have grown, we really haven't - I would characterise our number of sessions and views as broadly stable / unchanged.

It's a different story with the number of posts - dropped from over 2,000 in December 2020 to over 1,100 last month - however,  December 2020 was a peak from a running rate in other months around that time of 1,300 and last month was marginally up from the current typical value.   79 members were logged in yesterday (compared to 99 on the previous day before - 31.12.2020).  And there were 155 different users logged in during April 2023 versus 184 in December 2020.

An interpretation?  A drift towards being much more of a rail user and specialist interest club and less of a site that's got new members registering, BUT a substantial number of guests arriving hear in searching for answers.  And we are very much an "every cloud has a silver lining" site - bad news such as the closure of Didcot to Oxford because of the failed bridge has been good news for our stats, generating a thread with over 100 posts.

 
In May, our Coffee Shop traffic leapt for the wrong reasons. The sudden withdrawal of the majority of GWR's long distance train fleet for safety checks, and the timetable chaos, news flows and speculation that followed put our posting rate up five fold overnight. We had the second busiest month in a year, and that without any pre-planned publicity.  Later in the month, the Williams/Shapps report which announced Great British Railways generated another, but short lived traffic spike.  Graphed in sessions day by day (with the dotted line showing the previous month) it looks like this:



Across the whole month, users up by 31% to 4,800 in 19,500 sessions, with a session (visit) on average looking at six pages. 95% of sessions were from within the UK. Bounce rate (people who arrive at a page and don't click onto a second page) was around 30% which I feel is a remarkably low figure; a bounce is not necessarily a bad thing is someone arrived at exactly the information they need.

Taking a wide look at some rather odd stats, here's a graph of bounce rate against time ... with the wild fluctuations at regular intervals being because the forum is so quiet in the middle of the night that one or two sessions in an hour (that's the sampling interval) can sent the rate down to 0% or up to 100%:

 
January 2021 ... no big changes in underlying stats from December 2020, though post numbers are down a little - perhaps because we haven't had an advent quiz ("only 333 days to Christmas")





Couple of comments - the spikes about a week ago were some sort of automata from the west coast of the USA - look odd, but no damage. Take them out, and things like the percentage from the UK goes up above 90% again. And notice the number of pages per visit by country, and bounce rates for the USA, indicate it accounts for less than 1% of pages served.

 
The Coffee Shop finished 2020 in a flurry of activity, with over 2000 posts in December.

December is always busy with a daily advent quiz, but it's astonishing that in 2020, even after the coronavirus pandemic that has supressed train use (and we're all about train use) it actually grew on the previous year.  Perhaps that's because members are all fed up and wanted sometime to do.  And it could be because this forum has come to be a part of the daily routine for quite a number of well informed members, and as such a a valuable resource between ourselves and for any decision makers and influencers who care to read us - and we know that some do.

184 forum members were logged in during December, 99 of them on New Year's Eve alone. 15 had already been there in 2021 when I put my light out and turned over to go to sleep at a quarter past one.

Last 28 days, v previous 28 days:


Some numbers on that:


Where are people coming from, how many pages are they looking at, how often do they come back?

 
The start of a new month is when I look back at our site and server for the last month and do a quick review of how we've been doing. 1316 posts in September, down from 1375, and 1339 the month before.  Remarkably stable considering our server move.  Other stats and graphs are pretty much "no news" too.  Here is the graph from the domain - so including the switch point (I have drawn a red line at about the point we switched)

 

No ... based on worldwide searches for straightforward code examples in open source programming languages.  Most example provides start with the simplest possible "hello world" example, then take ten steps in their second example to something that's so complex it flies over people's heads.  We have a huge number of examples (but now becoming a bit stale) which help with the intermediate steps.

 
Was the USA sourcing from yourselves on your cruise holiday perchance!

 
"Has the formum gone quiet?" ... a question of me the other day by a regular vistor. Hmmm ... it feels a bit that way. So I took a look back at ten years of stats - graphing posts per month (red line) and new topics per month (blue dots).



At first glance, July looks like a disaterous fall, with a levelling in August.  But then look back at the sawtooth and you'll see that traffic plummetted in early summer in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 ... not quite every year, but certainly an underlying seasonal pattern.  Further, we can correlate the forum's business to some extent against the performance of the customer provision by GWR, and I might suggest that recent years where summer posting have remained bouyant are summer years in which staff shortages and short forms have had a serious impact on performance it a way that we didn't see a few years back.   This summer, we're very much put of that comfort zone of normallity, few of us are traveling as much as we used to (some hardly at all) and perhaps it's remarkable how well the forum has held up.   Watching brief, adjustments to make perhaps, but no panic.  And a note that that the verical axes on that graph are compressed / not showing all the way down to zero.

Where perhaps we have drift-changed over the past few years is towards a wider area of posting - more topics of general rail interest not just GWR, more historic and heritage posts, a little more on other public transport, and also much more forward looking stuff to social change, climate change, and politics, and how they will effect rail and other transport use.  I'm delighted that the proportion of 'member only' and internal moderator posts remains very low indeed (though such posts are included in the counts above).

Now - what is the pattern of our visitors - this from Google Analytics for the last six months:



I am profoundly unshocked by anything here!   For comparison, here is the same diagram for the last month for http://www.wellho.net - my main business website, not gently servicng open source hints and tips and visitors not selected on natural geography, but rather on where in the world people are wrifing software and looking for answers in English.

 
April 2020 - 2184 Coffee Shop posts in the 30 day, with 102 members posting during the month. And those stats are startlingly similar to previous Aprils - we've had 1213, 1531, 1765, 2132 and 2370 in the previous five years numbers of posters in the month 124, 106, 104, 125, 116, 102.  But I do note changes - a thinnng out of GWR and other publice transport operational posts, and a broadening of topics such as pastimes such as brodcast media.   

This is pretty much what I would expected bearing in mind the current Covid-19 emergency changes ... a paid survey report coming back with those results would typically warrant an "I could have told them that" and "what a waste of money doing the survey" response. But hidden within the numbers, a slight decline from last year in single-post visitors during the month, countered by more posts from 'regulars' - a 15% chargeover, if you like.  Again, with thought this might have been predicted.

Being "as expected", we have coped well and the forum has continued - perhaps one of the few normallities at the moment. Further challenges await - much depencent on the waves we have to ride in the storm of restarts, the potential sinking of services that were inconvenient, outdated or loss making, or the doldrums calm of continued lockdown, with the crew running out of supplies of stories, patience and sanity.

 
What an extraordinary month! Various sources - All for March 2020

Marginally fewer different users


Number of pages broadly unchanged


Number of pages per session increases


Number of posts increases during month


Public transport use falls off a cliff! (Government briefing)


and via https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52105526 :

 
We had a visitor from Eswatini last month (yes, I had to look that up) ... and 4,513 from the UK, who came back (on average) between 4 and 5 times (20,216 sessions), visiting (again on average) 6.28 pages per session.

Early in the month, we also saw unwanted activity from Hong Kong - 1,156 users only one of whom came back, and each of whom visited just one page. These users were arriving in droves - arrival rates up to 20 times what we normally see and tested our server (I had at one point to reload databases); for the month as a whole, they accounted for 18% of our visitors (grand total 6,462) but less than 1% of pages served.  I have added something to our server configuration to spot these visitors and reject their requests meaning that they no longer get anywhere near the stats I am reporting, but there does remain a small resource call each time they ask and we tell them to "**** off". In future, I would expect to see other similar activity, modified (as happens with these things) so that they no longer get sent packing until I put another line in the server config. I don't believe this is a specific attack on the Coffee Shop - just us being caught in crossfire.

1670 posts in the month - not untypical for a February, with 125 new topics started. Which works out as 13.4 posts per topic.  5 years ago, it was 11.9 posts per topic and 10 years ago it was 12.2, so once again remarkably stable.

 

I thought back to this post this evening ... when I noticed that each of the last seventeen posts has been by a different member.    Rather sadly, I'm about to break the sequence as I posted something else just prior to this.

 
Some stats from 2019 from Google Analytics, comparing the Coffee Shop's traffic to other domains I took after on our server.

Users	uk	session	pageviews
49	8	57	61	Site 1
278	38	306	340	Site 2
379	54	389	546	Site 3
693	378	974	2879	The Well House Collection
2808	2198	5650	11178	MRUG
65174	58195	269900	1715971	Coffee Shop
390120	37359	455138	534998	Well House Consultants

I know we have some folks here who look after other web sites ... I would be very interested to know what the stats for some of them look like. I appreciate that would probably be private / in confidence rather than publishing stats and naming as I have done for four sites.

 
A half hourley Swansea to Portsmouth and back, with 4 Voyager is but a dream, let alone 8 (HST?) would get me out and about again for sure, to Salisbury, Bradford on avon, Bath, Bristol, oh so many other nice places, fom here in Christchurch, well Hinton Admiral.

 
In answer to a question I was asked ...

In the last day, 23 different members have posted
In the last week, 67 different members have posted
In the last month, 108 different members have posted

 
We have just completed the busiest August ever on the forum (measured in number of posts) - looking all the way back to 2007. Not by a huge amount, but the busiest anyway. 

Part of the growth can - for once - be assigned to a big positive - that was "Meet the Manager" when Mark Hopwood came onto the forum to answer questions early in the month.  There is still a tail of that to follow up  - thank you for various reminders over the last few days and, please, the delay / lack of that follow up relates to the forum and not to Mark or his team ... and we should concede "Meet the Manager" with a further "Thank you" and a rosy glow of how it worked, even though some of the elements discussed remain far from rosy.

Just like August 2018, the forum was busy in August 2019.  And, sadly, a significant amount of that remains concerns at issues ... staff shortages, cancellations, infrastructure issues have not gone away. Indeed short term cancellations on the TransWilts feel even worse than in previous years, and planned engineering service reductions  have been replaced by very short notice (a few hours up to a a day) which really knock passenger confidence.  We also have new problems like overhead wire problems. I do look forward to a quieter forum at some time in the future because there's nothing going wrong to take about - though even better would be a forum where we're onto positives ... pictures of the construction of Aztec West station, new artwork at Portishead, marketing of the combined rail-and-bus Wessex season, welcoming  the increase from 5 to 8 carriages on the half hourly Swansea to Portsmouth service, and celebrating the ForAll railcard.

 

A lot of common sayings don't bear close examination, and "you can't turn back the clock" must be about the silliest. Obviously you can - we all do it to match conventional time as it changes, with place or season. We can also do it for any other reason, for no reason, or by mistake. What we can't do is change time itself to match a clock.

On top of that, if you do turn your clock back a whole day, it says ...exactly the same. While a clock may have a date indication, that bit is a calendar, not a clock. (Electronics and computer jargon is different from everyday usage in this.) Of course you can't change time itself to match a calendar either.

But now I shall have to admit that confusing clocks and calendars just human nature, and hardly warrants such criticism.

 

No. I would call it the time! 

 

Why not? Isn't 03:26:53 pm a valid date? The orthography may be unfamiliar, but...

 

I'm analysing ... looks like a lot of Google references from China, and not to any specific page.   Keeping an eye on it ... even as I write, still around 750 "users" where previous record was 488.   Expect to see a glitch in site stats tomorrow.

 
Well that has broken a long standing record.

Incidentally who programmed the software to show the time as 03:26:53 am 

 

Indeed - that unusual happening was what brought me along to have a look!

 
most online 845 at 3 in the morning today?

 
Off the routine monthly cycle of quoting a few server stats, here are some mid-month graphs. Spotting some characteristics that are a little different, I spent the last couple of hours taking a look; sharing some of the graphs

 
Post numbers have dipped in June to 1978 - slightly below the 2,000 level which is what I treat as a very loose target.  Having said which, June is typically a quiet month for posts. The numbers are up on last year (1852 posts), on 2017 (just 1334 posts that June) and 2016 (1348 posts) ...

 

#MeToo!

 
Nice to see there are big blue and green dots over my house.....

 
Some stats work I have been doing ... on visits to the Coffee Shop



Left hand diagram shows (solid line) sessions over a 2 week period in May leading up to and after Community Rail in the City.  Dashed line is same 2 week period in April.  Easy to draw spurious conclusions ... April dip in the second week was due to a small event called Easter, and I have no doubt that part of the reason for the rise second week in May was to do with the final 4 HSTs in regular service off Paddington.

Top right diagram shows visits per hour yesterday

Maps show UK location of visitors yesterday (blue spotted diagram on left) and for the last 4 weeks (green spotted diagram on right).  I was going to use just the 4 week diagram, but there was so much data on there it was a flooded page so I thinned it out to just a typical day; nothing special about yesterday that I'm aware of for that diagram or the one above.

If you load the image above into a separate window / tab, you'll see it a little bigger. For download purposes I've used a .jpg and being a diagram rather that a picture, it remains a low bandwidth item!

 
February posts dipped below 2,000 ... first time in.year. "Just" 1896 posts.  But then it was the busiest February since 2014 ... and February 2014 was the month that the Dawlish Sea Wall got washed out (was that really five years ago?).  February is also a short month - posts per day average up from 65 per day in January to 68 per day in February, with a whole background of no major weather problems or announcements.

I don't have (easy to access) stats - but noting (and big welcome) to new members last month - more I think than in a typical month.  We never have a flood of people joining, and value each and every one of you.  Double plus welcome to those who have posted for the first time too.

 

Gentlemen, the admin / moderator team appreciates your natural British reserve ... and there have been many others who have signed up and left their virgin post to months or years later.    However, we are a forum for passengers, passengers have questions and really should not be put off posting ... some of the more basic questions, indeed, are the lifeblood of the forum and it's great to have hooks onto which the more-experienced can hang answers.  I strongly encourage newcomers to join and post - just don't flood/spam us with 400 posts in 2 months!



http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/better/day6.html

 

Same here.  I lurked to understand the culture and operation of the board.  I only joined when I felt I could contribute positively to the discussion.

 
I don't know if I am typical, but I "lurked" for quite a while before making my first tentative post. I would look forward to seeing some of those visitors making the same quantum leap this year.

 
In answer to a suggestion that "it's always the same dozen people who post" I have taken a look back to the start of this year ... yes, just 9 and a bit days ... to reveal

217 different users have been logged in (*) . 84 of them have posted - 582 messages in total so far.

In the last 12 months, 267 different users have posted.

Edit to add ...
(*) - that's users logged in - there have been around 1,500 visitors if you count guests as well as logged in members.

 
Posts in 2016 - 18,007. Posts in 2017 - 22,300.  Posts in 2018 - 27.079.
Rise on year to December 2017 - 23.8%.
Rise on year to December 2018 - 21.4%.

 

It's broken. Can't understand it - it was fine next week.

 

Oops. Post corrected.

 

December?

Can I have a go in your time machine?

 
November was our busiest month on the Coffee Shop for over a decade and our third busiest ever.



The correlation between GWR having problems and post numbers seems to have been broken - thank goodness.  In other words, although our post numbers have gone up, I don't think there have been worse problems - indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that things might have started heading in the right direction.  Ironically I started writing this on a freezing platform at Chippenham .. I'm going to be 80 minutes late home because of a connection failure, and the way it works at Chippenham is that when you relly need the waiting room (as it gets late and cold) they chuck you out.

Our growth ... is somewhat fertilised by a number of new members.  And nurtured by our existing members and team. I hope that I or another of the moderators / admins has welcomed each at their first post, and made the feel very welcome.  Changes at the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership this autumn have released me and others from a number of constraints put on the exposure of the Coffee Shop to potential new members, and I think that change may have helped us reach some new members already.  And, with this new more visible situation I have been looking and asking around at rail meetings of all sorts - finding and meeting a handful of members at most of them.  Interesting.

---

The graph is spikey - although just a few short of 3,000 posts in November, and headed past that landmark in the future, don't expect magic in December ...

 

Up again 10% in October - 2111 to 2322 year on year.   I would say "just general ebb and flow" except that there were a handful of exceptionally busy days which coincided with rail incidents such as "all stops" between Newton Abbot and Exeter, and between London and Reading.

 

In September - 2346 posts. Down from 2499 in September 2017; interesting change in pattern ... first time this year we're down year on year.

September figure series, this decade ... 2311 - 2377 - 1430 - 1588 - 1782 - 1973 - 1487 - 2499 - 2346

 

Number of posts for August 2018 - 2270 - up from 1747 in August 2017
Number of posts for July 2018 - 2370 - up from 2135 in July 2017
Number of posts for June 2018 - 1852 - up from 1334 in June 2017
Number of posts for May 2018 - 2040 - up from 1158 in May 2017

 
Wow! That's quite a jump and yes as you say sadly reflects on how things have been on the GWR network these past few months.

 
Number of posts for April 2018 - 2132 - up from 1213 in April 2017
Number of posts for March 2018 - 2361 - up from 1796 in March 2017
Number of posts for February 2018 - 1869 - up from 1376 in February 2017

Historically, our post count fluctuation has reflected the fluctuation in performance and satisfaction with our main train provider (FGW, now GWR) with more posts suggesting more concerns.  So not a good couple of months for them in their customer / passenger's eye.

Please note though that our March and April figures have been distorted by our own issues on the forum, with our server crash over Easter which has reduced the number of posts remaining on our server by between 100 and 150 for each of those two months.

 
Every so often, I take a look at the forum stats at a different angle (more often than I tell members about to keep me finger on the pulse!) ... and I have looked at a couple of thins this morning - all about FEBRUARY.

Post numbers in February each year since our foundation in 2007:
309 - 3626 - 1741 - 1775 - 1719 - 1623 - 2011 - 2424 - 1684 - 1472 - 1376 - 1869

Boards with over 30 messages / replies during the month just gone:

 

Brexit - with a vengeance. 

 
I'm not far from you, bobm. GeoIP has me in Walsall.

 
I looked earlier and I had been sent to Coventry.  Says it all really!   

 

As IP addressed get reassigned, copy databases become less reliable if you're getting location from a site like GeoIP as we do for some stuff behind the scenes.  However, Google Analytics probably uses its own system and keeps it very much current, and I would suspect that averaged out the geographic mapping of visitors is somewhere between "quite good" and "very good".  I wouldn't trust individual splodges on the map, but I would accept the general pattern.

 

And me to either Cardiff or Poland. Plus I have checked in over the past 6 months from 8 foreign countries. Does this skew things?

 
Since I upgraded my broadband some IP locators have moved me to Scotland.....

 

I probably visited a few times from Skines, Chania, Crete during June.

 

Visitors to the forum by where in the UK their located ...the more from any one place, the bigger the circle and the deeper the colour. It's a map from Google Analytics and because so much internet traffic is marked as just "London" it looks odd.

Here are the top ten - number (and percentage) of sessions


The last 10 places - with one session each - were

 
What does the map of Britain show, and why does it look as if parts of Sussex, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire are flooded?

 
A promotional montage showing how busy we are and accompanying a Facebook post telling people what we're about.

If you're a Facebook member - please share - https://www.facebook.com/TransWilts/posts/1114374198662621 - although we have nearly 10,000 visitors in a month, I suspect there might be a few more who haven't heard of us 

 
Looking back at the last five marches - 2017 at the top down to 2013 at the bottom



Source - Google Analytics

 
Do they simply ignore those views from pax who don't let Google know their location? Or are they counted as a sort of 'we don't know'?

 
2015 ... 20,711 posts in 1,421 new subjects. 1,864,301 page views in 349,307 sessions by 120,976 users. A high of 1,855 sessions on 21st September, and a low of 460 on 25th December. 95% of sessions were from the UK, 1% from the USA, and the remaining 4% spread across 146 other countries. I remain amazed at just how many new subjects we come up with and how busy the site remains.  A huge thank you to all our contributors.

And a piece of trivia ... a single page from each of Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania, Timore-Leste, Togo, Swazilan, Syria, El Salvador, Somalia, Rwanda, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Malawi, Macedonia, Madagasgar, Moldova, Monaco, Liberia, Guatemaa, Guadaloupe, Gambia, Greenland, Belarus, Botswana, Antigua & Barbuda and Afghanistan.

 


Although I don't post monthly in this thread, I do keep an eye on "how we're doing" month by month.  Signs of things being a bit different in the sentiment of members would very likely show up in subtle changes in use patterns.

We continue to have about 1,000 human sessions per day, totalling around 5,000 page views.  Around 380 of the sessions are for single pages (bounces) - so the "5 pages per session" chart could be split down to around 380 sessions to one page, and 420 user sessions visiting an impressive 11 pages on average.   Graphs shown are 1st January to 31st August 2015. 

Not shown, but 19 out of 20 sessions are from people within the UK (and many of the rest will be spam signup requests, of which we get a reduced but still significant number)

Many thanks to the admin and moderator team for helping keep on top of this lot. Yet I'm delighted just how little authoritative intervention is necessary - and that's a big "thank you" to the members too.

 
In response to questions about another site that we host, I've been back to Google Analytic logs to the start of 2013 - see http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4474_.html for graphs of how the Coffee Shop has performed against their measures over the past 28 months.

 
Two attachments - a Google Analytics summary graph from the first four days of last week, and the same graph from the first four days of this week - I look a look to see whether there was any effect (and if so what) on our traffic from last Monday's announcement on the operation of trains in our area by First until 2019.  It's probably a fair assumption that the traffic rise of people viewing posts was caused by the announcement - we can see it lead to a lot of extra contributions, and I can see no other factors that would have caused the rise in readership.

(The 20,687 views chart is from 16th to 19th March; the 32,076 one from 23rd to 26th March)

 
Our web server's log files are pretty big, and it's pretty hard to get an idea of what's going on from numbers - a picture paints many thousand words.    Here are diagrams of requests per hour from the February logs.





Technicalities (how to program things like this and to learn it), grabbed from the course I was giving last week:
http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4445_Graphing-presentations-in-Python-huge-data-numpy-and-matplotlib.html

 
It's quite a while since I updated this occasional series of "how is the forum doing?" reports ... so a good time to look at the last three months, and compare them to a couple of months at the beginning of the year - what I would describe as a typical January, and an extraordinary February (when the sea wall breach at Dawlish coincided with a huge surge of visitors).


The top eight statistics are from our Google Analytics, the bottom two are from our forum stats.

As a quick "how are we doing" shorthand, I keep an eye on the "New Posts" on the forum - and indeed Chris from Nailsea's graph, updated every month at the top of this board, keeps us all usefully in the picture on that - thanks for keeping that up, Chris. 

In my view, the figures combine to show a picture of good stability, with the biggest changes being due to the external feature of whether or not there are big happenings effecting passenger train services in the Great Western area - those changes aren't a surprise and are welcomed as they show that we're in line with the daily pulse.  And since October was marked by a number of severe disruptions between Paddington and Reading (mostly NOT due to First, for the record!) I'm going to hope - for the sake of our members - for a quieter November.

 

I do a reasonable "Dead Parrot" sketch myself, you know...

 
For anyone who's interested in seeing the program I used, I've put in online at http://www.wellho.net/resources/ex.php?item=y106/forum.py and added further commentary at http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4236_Using-Python-to-analyse-last-years-forum-logs-Good-coding-practise-discussion-.html . 

<advert>Please tell your techincal friends and colleagues (and yourself) that if they or you want to learn Python (or Ruby, Perl, PHP, Lua, C, C++ or Tcl) that I'm your man. You'll be helping to keep the server that hosts this forum running (it has to be paid for somehow!). And - new for 2014 - you can travel practiaclly travel all the way to us by much more sustainable public transport. If I'm coming to train you on site, I'll be coming all the way by train 9 times out of 10! See http://www.wellho.net </advert>

 
To augment Chris's regular monthly update, I'm following up here on my "occasional" series of site statistics, and I've taken the new year as an opportunity to go right back and analyse annual posts and new topics to the very start of the forum.

In year 2007 there were   7330 new posts in   1320 new topics
In year 2008 there were  25211 new posts in   2747 new topics
In year 2009 there were  25925 new posts in   1892 new topics
In year 2010 there were  24293 new posts in   2111 new topics
In year 2011 there were  21836 new posts in   1807 new topics
In year 2012 there were  18682 new posts in   1657 new topics
In year 2013 there were  22285 new posts in   1533 new topics

We should ignore 2007 ... as the forum didn't exist until the end of January, and then needed "seeding" and nurturing.  But since then we've been remarkably stable.  During this time there have been major changes at First Great Western - in many / most cases for the better, yet at the same time the extra loading of more and more passengers has created new problems, and at times it's seemed that factors such as the weather have got more extreme, leading to to tougher operational issues.  And of course the stock has got older - I don't think that First Great Western are operating a single piece of rolling stock manufactured since the forum started.

As time goes on, is there less to talk about?   It would appear not.   The number of new topics drops, but that's because so much carries on with existing discussions.  1488 of the posts in 2013 were on the "Reading Station Improvements" thread which was started in 2010 and it's great to see the continuity and interaction of discussions there - we really shouldn't worry about a modest decrease in new topics.

As ever ... a big thank you to my fellow admins, to the moderator team, and especially to all the forum's contributing members for making the coffee shop a successful, and a pleasant, place to spend a few hours!

Long forgotten about now by most members, I expect, was the unplanned server switch in June which took the forum down for a few hours, with progressive recovery over the following day.  And as the forum came back on line, security algorithms changed meaning that every active member had to reset their password / account to log in.  Although we were very concerned at this at the time, it's wonderful to see that the effect on the ongoing success of the forum appears to be minimal.

 
Here we are in November, with similar numbers to those we had earlier in the year ... 31370 visits (of which 30097 were from the UK) from 13895 unique visitors, 152114 page views in the last month.  Top cities - London, Bristol, Oxford, Maidenhead, Cardiff, Birmingham, Plymouth, Reading, Bath and Exeter.  We know this latter data tends only to give a geographic trend; its interesting to compare it to another site we host that includes Cambridge, Southampton and Milton Keynes, Brighton, Edinburgh, Leeds and Northampton in the 'top city' list. No big surprises; graph shapes still the same, though with a surge last weekend (30% higher traffic) in the run up to and aftermath of the big storm.

 
Many thanks to Chris from Nailsea for his monthly update on site use at http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=10596.0 .   That gives a useful month on month, year on year picture of our growth / shrinkage / stability, whether it's due to our own performance in running the forum or the desire of people to chat about the rail and related issues we cover.

Continuing here with my semi-regular series in which I pick out an aspect of our performance from the last month, I've taken a look at weekly cycles - which day of the week is busier.   Graph shows number of visits per day:



Interesting to note that Saturdays are consistently quieter. Looking at the same graph hourly, I find it harder to see that same trends - but it *is* there with lower daytime peaks:

 
Some of our members keep returning, and others just call in occasionally. Likewise we have guests who drop ir regularly (even frequently), and guests who come here just once.   What's the split, and how long do people stay?   In April, we had 31,849 visits (30,318 from the UK) accounted for by 12,616 unique visitors. These are Google Analytics figures, so real figures - although the unique visitor count will count you twice if you use two different computers.  The visitors viewed no less that 175,786 pages in total - that's between 5 and 6 pages on average. I've provided a graph of this through the month. 



As you might expect, visitors are typically here from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. with the highest spikes between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. - up to 90 visits per hour. (not seen in the graph above) with a handful of visitors even during the wee small hours.

Posts in April were over 2000 for the fourth successive month - that's starting to look like a significant change from 2012 (when the figure was between 1010 and 1982 per month) and 2011 (when only 2 months exceeded 2000).   It's hard to guess why it's increased - are we getting more popular, are peope finding us more welcoming and feeling freer to post, or is the railway industry and those parts we're involved with giving us more to talk about?

 
Another traffic rise in January - 2361 new posts, which is the highest for years (since July 2010).  I'm trying to work out why; December 2012 was the highest for 2012, with that number encouraged by the truley horrible performance (much of it weather related) up to Christmas, and if you had asked me for a January forecast I would have got it wrong.

You'll see from the stats that our signup requests (1721) are down to around a fifth of what they were in November (9384) ... that's an artificial change; the majority of signups are what's known as "forum spam" and stronger filters have allowed the exclusion of much more of this traffic without any significant hit in genuine requests.

Some stats from Google Analytics .... 33,026 (14,588 different)  visitors in the month calling up a total of 192,624 pages.   December stats 29,355 / 12,714 / 173,785.  31,080 visitors were from the UK, and a further 446 might have been, but could not be identified to anywhere for certain. Average visit duration was 6 minutes and 25 seconds, with visits away from the UK having a much lower duration. Towns and cities listed are predominantly in the GW area; not a reliable measure, except that when I compare it to our other sites, the pattern's quite different.

 
We concluded 2012 with the busiest month of 2012 - no fewer that 1982 new posts, in what's usually quite a quiet month as people head off for a Christmas break.  But this year was different - perhaps because of how difficult train travel was for many people looking to get away - see http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=11794.msg123310#msg123310

In the final quarter of 2012, we had 88,504 visits to the coffee shop of which 83,502 were identified as being from within the UK.  Many people visit us multiple times - Google Analytics tells us that we've had 37,858 unique visitors in that period, which is an impressive number - it helps put some sort of measure onto "guests" who are an an important part of our customer base - reading and learning from the material here, but leaving such a light footprint that they're not often noticed.

 


As I write, there have been 91,497 applications for membership since the forum started and we curently have 1,238 approved members.  Only a handful of approved members have ever been deleted, so that's an overall ratio of 73:1.

Now - that's not really 'meaningful' as it combines two phases.  Let me try for something current ... 24 new members approved during November, stats say 9342 applications, so you're looking at around 1 in 400 accepted.

The administrators have mechanisms in place to help us identify the genuine signups, and it's not a case of us having to manually reject all that lot.  Where there's a doubtful case, we can always instigate an email conversation with the potential member to clarify their credentials; it may look a bit nosey, but it helps us maintain the security and effectiveness of the board. And can I please reassure anyone who's thinking of joining that people with a genuine interest are very welcome indeed - we try to make it as easy for you as possible.

 
What amazes me is the number of sign-ups each month and how it has grown over time.  Much as it would be great if they were all "genuine" sign-ups many must be, as has been reported before, joining for reasons far removed from the topics we like to discuss on here.   The fact that so few ever see the light of day is a tribute to the rear-guard action fought by the powers that be to keep them at bay. 

In search of meaningful statistics what sort of percentage of sign-ups are classified as bona fide?

 
29033 "real"visits from the UK out of 30,896 to the forum in November. At the other end of the scale, single real visits from Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Belarus, Chile, China, Guernsey, Croatia, Isle of Man, Iceland, Jordan, Cambodia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Maldives, Puerto Rico, Serbia, and Uganda

Busiest day - 22nd November with 1,335 visits; quietest 24th with 838.  The busiest hour with 105 visits was from 21:00 on 21st November.  I think we see the effect of the weather on the forum, just as we've seen the effect of the weather on our area's rail services.

 
Interesting stats

I think some of them may be slightly out of area though. A lot of ISP's (PlusNet and Eclipse/KCOM) Spring to mind use BT Wholesale Trunk Lines to the ISP networks which are mostly based in London. So even though you appear to be in London, you are in actuality much, much further away

 
Sharing some of the October stats with you:

Visitors per hour:


Overall statistics from real browsing visitors (robots and crawlers don't log with Google)


Splits by country (top ranked only shown):


Split within the UK by town / city (top ranked only shown):

 
In September, we had 26,631 visits from 11,756 unique visitors. Pages viewed were 147,806 and the average duration was 6 minutes and 27 seconds. 24,991 visits were identified as being from the UK.   And that's according to Google Analytics. Top cities reported were London, Bristol, Oxford, Birmingham, Reading, Bath and Cardiff. Amongst 300 places that reported just a single visit were Maraciabo, Dershingham, Allentown and Aberdeen (turns out to be one of the Aberdeens in the USA; there were 14 from the Aberdeen in Scotland).

Our local stats show 1430 posts, with 121 new topics started - that's about 48 posts and 4 new topics per day - not bad going, when you consider that so much has already been asked and said over the years.   Over 5000 applications were made to join the forum - the vast majority being "forum spammers" who have already been reported by other forums, and whom we (the admins) are able to reject quite quickly;  Chris_f_n - I really appreciate your assistance in going through these, as we really don't want to accidenatlly reject, or delay, genuine signups.

Personally, September saw me travelling far and wide within the UK. For three of those trips, I was able to use the train ... for others (such a Weymouth and Worcester), the lack of trains pushed me onto the road - and that was a lack of trains at appropriate times, and not a lack of railway lines.  The Worcester trip would have been "saved" to the train if it weren't for the withdrawl of the mid evening bus back to my home town at the start of the month.

 
..and there were quite a few major delays/issues in July too which will explain a bit of the increase I imagine...

 
I think we can thank the DfT for the very busy July. They gave us HLOS for Control Period 5, the Intercity Express Programme contract award and the Invitation to Tender for the Greater Western Franchise.

 
For my end of July update, I'm going to focus on the ups and downs of the last couple of months, and looking for any significance therein.

In June, there were just over 1000 posts to the forum, with 78 new topics opened, and that was the quietest month for a very long time indeed.  Yet in July, without any "marketing push" or anything at our end, posts rocketed to over 1700 making it the third busiest month of the year, and 126 new topics were started.  These figures from http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?action=stats

Before you jump to any conclusions - consider some other stats. From our Google Analytic stats we had 23,850 visits in June, rising to 28,600 visits in July. Pageviews were 112,645 in June, rising to 161,127 in July, with pages per visit moving up from 4.72 to 5.63

71% increase in posts.
61% increase in subjects.
43% increase in pageviews
40% increase in pages viewed per visit
20% increase in visits.
and let's not forget
3% increase in reporting period (30 days -> 31 days)

Google analytics also reports 21,861 unique visitors across the whole 2 month period, with over 49,000 of 52,000 visits from the UK (and the second most popular "country" was unknown / unidentificable - a further 900 visits).

I'm going to suggest that June was something of a lull month in railway news - "quietly as she goes", whereas there's been quite a lot happening in July.  Still lots of visits in June - just not so much to comment on.  More visits in July, and more to read and comment on too, hence the rises in visitor numbers, pages viewed per visit, and new posts.

And when all's said and done, 31,477 unique visitors in the last 3 months is an awful lot of people looking at the site, and they're averaging over 5 pages per visit.

May, June, July - visits per day to tracked pages on this site:

 
When I started to read this thread I was at Bridgwater. Now I'm approaching Weston-super-Mare!   

 
Quite - very impressive!

 
It just goes to show what a well read site the coffee shop is.

 

"Featuring France" ...

In the week to midnight last night, we had 33 visits from France.  On average, each visited 2.55 pages.  36% of the visits were to just a single page.  Here's how they were distributed:



By comparison, we had 5583 visits from the UK, on average looking at 4.67 pages, out of a total of 6019 visits to the site. 131 visits can't be identified to their country of origin.  There were a total of 52 visiting countries, with single visits form some distant countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

In the UK, there were more visits from each of Cheltenham (39), Yeovil (43), Staines (51) Guildford (55), Melksham (59) and  Teddington (67) than there were from the whole of France. Top 4 UK visiting cities were London, Bristol, Oxford and Bath, accounting between just those 4 for 2143 of the 5583 UK visits.  Amongst towns from which we had just a single visit were Addlestone, Basildon, Chatteris, Dartford, Eastleigh, Fleetwood, Gravesend, Hailsham, Ilkley, Kettering, Lancing, Macclesfield, Nantwich, Ormskirk, Pudsey, Ripon, Saxmundham, Tadcaster, Uttoxeter and  Wallington.

 

I'll have a look and see what the overnight stats say about French visits then.

 
I suspect I will be easily identifiable in the next range of stats. Im visiting the site today from le tranche-sur-mer in the vendee region of France.would be interested where exactly it defines me as visiting from though!

 

Now that we're well out of the Easter period - data from 21st to 27th April inclusive:

1.   London   1,473    4.59
2.   Bristol   423   14.65   
3.   Oxford   234   6.51   
4.   Plymouth   185   6.35   
5.   Reading   185   4.85   
6.   Bath   171   7.78   
7.   Birmingham   169   4.61   
8.   Milton Keynes   129   7.19   
9.   Cardiff   119   5.87   
10.   Southampton    109   8.20