One thing I was never able to easily do with the old MacScripter software was get stats on how the site is being used. Now that we are on Discourse I can track almost everything that’s happening on the site. For instance, here’s the posting volume/month over the past two years:
Here are the new user signups/month over the last two years:
And from the About page, general site stats:
Now that we are on Discourse I have easy access to stats for the site. For those that want to dig into this in detail, here’s a spreadsheet with data covering the last 3 years for daily signup counts, new topic counts and new post counts.
MacScripter 2020-2023.zip (511.2 KB)
You’ll see that the trend over the past three years are downward which isn’t surprising.
In addition, here are some details of our traffic levels. At our current pace, we’ll see over 500k hits (mostly from web crawlers) on the site per month. As an aside, the server behind all this is well within its capacity so we can easily handle spikes in viewership.
Its been a little over 30 days since MacScripter transitioned to Discourse. With my newfound visibility into site usage some interesting stats have emerged:
…and…
Don’t be deceived by the 1.1m page views, the vast majority are from web crawlers and we had someone beating on the server for a few days. Our real user activity is vastly smaller. I’ve yet to discover how to remove the web crawler numbers. Still, the server is happily handling this load so we are well set going forward.
