The prior version of the Forum (before ownership was transferred to CEA) wasnât set up for Analytics. We began tracking this data one month ago. The Forum currently gets ~3000 pageviews per day from ~1000 users.
Other data I could have provided to Peter if he had asked: New posts and comments are appearing at a much faster rate than before the new Forum launched.
For example, there were 26 posts in the month of September and 71 posts in February (not counting posts written by CEA staff). The average number of comments per post doesnât seem to have changed much, but the most commented-upon posts get many more comments than they used to (at least two posts in the last two months got more than 100, more than double the count of any post in September). The â71â number is pretty typicalâweâve been getting between two and three new posts per day in almost every week since the new Forum launched in November.
I havenât yet taught myself enough SQL to get these numbers from our database, but I found them within 10 minutes by clicking âload more postsâ a bunch of times on the âAll Postsâ page. If anyone else does the same, theyâll also see the dramatic uptick in new posts after the new Forum launched. (Though this doesnât mean that EA is more popular nowâthe new interface and extra promotion are probably most of the reason weâve seen more posts, rather than an increase in the number of people who care about the movement.)
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Peter didnât request this kind of data; he only asked for âpage views and [the] number of newly created accountsâ.
As far as I know, we donât have Analytics data for page views. Getting account creation data back to 2014 should be doable, but we didnât have time to get to that request before Peter published the post.
We are interested in this data for our own purposes and may collect it at some point; I offered to let Peter know if we did so he could update the post, and he replied positively to the offer.
I generated a graph of the number of EA Forum posts per year, as well as the number of new user registrations. I extracted the data using the GraphQL API.
The raw JSON data for all posts is here. I had to split the user data into two files due to upload limits. The raw JSON data for all unbanned (but otherwise unfiltered) users is here. The JSON data for all banned users is here.
I divided the users into four categories in order to try to make the numbers more useful. The year entries below list the frequency values in this order.
unbanned users with non-zero posts/âcomments and non-negative karma.
unbanned users with non-zero posts/âcomments and negative karma
unbanned users with zero posts/âcomments
banned users
That said, the databaseâs indices for number of posts and number of comments donât seem to reflect reality perfectly. Take a quick look at this table for what I mean.
Note: A previous version of this comment had different values, because I mistakenly was ignoring users with null-valued karma in the database. Now I just treat them as if they had zero karma.
The prior version of the Forum (before ownership was transferred to CEA) wasnât set up for Analytics. We began tracking this data one month ago. The Forum currently gets ~3000 pageviews per day from ~1000 users.
Other data I could have provided to Peter if he had asked: New posts and comments are appearing at a much faster rate than before the new Forum launched.
For example, there were 26 posts in the month of September and 71 posts in February (not counting posts written by CEA staff). The average number of comments per post doesnât seem to have changed much, but the most commented-upon posts get many more comments than they used to (at least two posts in the last two months got more than 100, more than double the count of any post in September). The â71â number is pretty typicalâweâve been getting between two and three new posts per day in almost every week since the new Forum launched in November.
I havenât yet taught myself enough SQL to get these numbers from our database, but I found them within 10 minutes by clicking âload more postsâ a bunch of times on the âAll Postsâ page. If anyone else does the same, theyâll also see the dramatic uptick in new posts after the new Forum launched. (Though this doesnât mean that EA is more popular nowâthe new interface and extra promotion are probably most of the reason weâve seen more posts, rather than an increase in the number of people who care about the movement.)
--
Peter didnât request this kind of data; he only asked for âpage views and [the] number of newly created accountsâ.
As far as I know, we donât have Analytics data for page views. Getting account creation data back to 2014 should be doable, but we didnât have time to get to that request before Peter published the post.
We are interested in this data for our own purposes and may collect it at some point; I offered to let Peter know if we did so he could update the post, and he replied positively to the offer.
I generated a graph of the number of EA Forum posts per year, as well as the number of new user registrations. I extracted the data using the GraphQL API.
The raw JSON data for all posts is here. I had to split the user data into two files due to upload limits. The raw JSON data for all unbanned (but otherwise unfiltered) users is here. The JSON data for all banned users is here.
Results:
Posts by month; Posts by year
(The post count includes âmetaâ posts.)
2011: 1
2012: 7
2013: 66
2014: 234
2015: 460
2016: 296
2017: 285
2018: 442
2019 (so far): 433
New user registrations by month; New user registrations by year. If you include banned users, you get this monstrosity.
I divided the users into four categories in order to try to make the numbers more useful. The year entries below list the frequency values in this order.
unbanned users with non-zero posts/âcomments and non-negative karma.
unbanned users with non-zero posts/âcomments and negative karma
unbanned users with zero posts/âcomments
banned users
That said, the databaseâs indices for number of posts and number of comments donât seem to reflect reality perfectly. Take a quick look at this table for what I mean.
Note: A previous version of this comment had different values, because I mistakenly was ignoring users with null-valued karma in the database. Now I just treat them as if they had zero karma.
2014: 336; 7; 186; 1
2015: 284; 9; 538; 1
2016: 188; 36; 540; 3
2017: 224; 70; 617; 7
2018: 366; 43; 746; 21
2019 (so far): 382; 22; 652; 1750
Thanks, this is really cool to see. I will follow up next year to add total posts as a metric. I added this idea to FN35.
Thanks. By the way, I updated the comment you replied to.
Thanks Aaron, very helpful data and context.
Vipul wrote up observations on Forum traffic from Sep 14-Dec 16, which seems to be based on data from Google Analytics. Any way to splice this data together with the more recent history?