GIRS Site Traffic

Robots are not a problem, and any site you look at usually has quite a few of them. These are typically spiders/crawlers that are indexing the site - it's actually good to have them, because that means the content becomes searchable. The forum automatically creates a site map and then submits that to Google and a few other search engines daily in order to keep the content up to date with them, so in return, the search engines go to the site and index everything. I may not be using the right terminology but you get the point.

This is also the reason that I installed the addon that hides spoiler content from robots (so you can hide your phone number/etc)

Spam bots are the problem, and we currently don't get any successful spammer registrations

 

Doesn't seem to be any less active than it was before and leading up to the transition. Its definitely not nearly as active as we had around the Macna hay day anymore, but for a relatively small club we don't do too bad. Social media with its ease of use and convenience has taken away traffic from a lot of forums, including ours. Hopefully now that the transition is done we can bring some of that traffic back since the site is more user, and especially mobile friendly.

 

There has been a lot of talk on forum admin sites about facebook taking traffic away from forums. What are you gonna do...to me, forums make it a lot easier to find information. On FB and other social media, you may be more engaged in an immediate conversation and might be able to get someone to answer your question quickly, but how do you know if they know anything about what they are talking about. On a forum, you can find a similar topic that was discussed and see several opinions and advice from people who do know what they are talking about...plus try to search for some old conversation where you learned something on FB, good luck.

Nonetheless, traffic has dropped and if you notice, there have been a ton of people getting out of the hobby over the past year or so. Lots of sale threads. Economy could be a big factor in this also.

But just for the record, you're not really imagining things. Here's the stats from the past 2 year (posts and PMs)

Ignore the last data point. That's June and only 8 days of data.

I think part of this is due to having a very hard time finding people to get into the leadership positions in each region and plan regular events and keep some momentum going. Also, it seems there is a general lack of interest in attending events - just a few people show up. But that also goes back to having regular events. At the BBQ meeting last weekend we discussed this a bit and are thinking of setting a specific weekend each month, like the 3rd Saturday, for a monthly event and lock that in and plan the events around that rather then trying to hash out a date where the most people can make it.

Just some thoughts...

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5 years

 

@Turbo's Aquatics When did we officially launch the new forum?

 

I think 4/29 or whatever that Sunday was

 

That is the way that almost every forum works. The old site was an exception to that rule. There is an addon that allows it to work like the old site did but I don't know if that would increase site traffic, it would just fill up your email. Either you're going to click the link and visit the thread, or you're not.