I was taking a look at the FAQ and I noticed the Statistics part: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/faq.php?faq=dp_faq#faq_statistics Is the graph always falling towards recent months or is this a recent trend? Just wondering.
If you are concerned about that dip thats visible in the after the october month I think it might be as we have just started with the month on November
Its a nice forum and dont think that it will fall down More and more members will join it in near future and it will grow more.
As he said, November is lower than previous months because we aren't very far into it. If you view as a week, it's lower too because we aren't very far into the current week either.
The reason I asked is because it states it's updated daily. Maybe I just caught it at the wrong time.
No, you didn't catch it at a wrong time. It's called the week/month not being over yet. So you think that being just three days in to the week, this week so far should have as many posts, users and so on as all of last week, or the week before, or the week....??!! Right!!!
Very cool that shawn makes these stats public...but then again who wouldn't with sick numbers like that.
Actually, the data only shows 2 days this week (stats are updates at midnight with the previous day's data). It will be showing 3 days for the week in about 1 1/2 hours.
I guess the forum is going down in flames. Look at all the registered users who have abandoned ship this week alone! Just watch, they will all come crawling back. On a serious note, I wonder how long the exponential growth can last. A ceiling has to be hit at some point.
In my opinion the quickest way to increasing members is increasing the aesthetical impact that the site has. Currently as it stands, it is the most uncreative web hosting community site, when you only take the aesthetics into account, once you look past the exterior the content is very very useful, but unfortunately, how many of us really turn past the first page of a book that has a bad cover?
Good point. But if you're serious about the internet game, you shoot for content first. And DP is content-galore.
When you are this big, growing at a highly exponential rate, and the content is this good, aesthetics don't mean shit. This has been proven over, and over, with lots of extremely successfull, high traffic sites. Exceptional design distracts from the content. Mediocre, even poor design adds a huge trust factor to a site. Users don't feel like it was contrived by some marketing team out to take your money. Craigslist, PlentyofFish, even Myspace falls into this category in my opinion with a dead simple basic generic template. Seems counter intuitive, but it is true at a deeper psychological level that most people don't realize. They may say they like a site that is well designed with nice graphics then go ahead and actually use the one that is not. With forums in particular, people are here for the content, first and foremost. But for some sites good design is essential. Depends on your niche.