[stack]

The FE Believers forum seems kind of active over there these days. Strange that they wouldn't allow you access back in the day. It seems more like a repository than an FE2FE debate section. Bishop has a good thread going on right now about (and I paraphrase) scriptural support for UA, but again, it seems more like a repository of ideas than a debate as no one else has engaged.

Maybe the problem is that there is about a handful of FEr's on either site. Personally, I'd love it if there were 50 FEr's to every REr here and there.

I will say, doing some metrics analysis for both sites, especially here, things have dropped off considerably. Maybe twitter has exploded so the forums don't matter as much, I wouldn't know, I don't follow TFES of twitter.

Recent analysis:

I did start diving into the numbers and came up with some entirely anecdotal, hardly scientific results. I picked 'New Posts' here and at TheFlatEarthSociety just to do a compare to see if I could target a trend. Again, super anecdotal, but what I found was interesting at least on a surface level.

Taking New Posts numbers from June of 2018 and comparing them to June of 2019, I found a 15% drop-off at TheFlatEarthSociey.com. However, at TFES.org, I found a whopping 142% drop-off. Probably means nothing as I simply picked 'New Posts' as a metric and maybe it's the wrong one. But the numbers are interesting nonetheless.

[Dr David Thork]

Our post count gets hit harder in the summer than the other site ... because we have lives and go outside.

Taking New Posts numbers from June of 2018 and comparing them to June of 2019, I found a 15% drop-off at TheFlatEarthSociey.com. However, at TFES.org, I found a whopping 142% drop-off. Probably means nothing as I simply picked 'New Posts' as a metric and maybe it's the wrong one.

It probably means you are hopeless at maths.

Let's put the numbers aside for a second and just apply a little logic. How can you possibly have a 142% drop in posts? 100% drop would be from however many you had to zero. This is like a sportsman saying during interviews that they gave 110%. You can't give more than 100% effort, nor can you have more than a 100% drop in the number of something. That's what percentage means ... out of 100. You can't say out of 100 the number I pick is 142.

[Pete Svarrior]

Every time we get a large drop in activity, a mathematical genius proclaims that it's the end of the line for us. If you look through some older S&C threads, you'll even find people extrapolating the date on which we'll stop posting altogether based on a linear projection.

[edit: Ah, there it is: https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=3594.msg78699#msg78699]

As I mentioned before, short term trends are useless here. We can lose a vast majority of visitors at any moment in time if Google's algorithms decide that we're no longer the best search result. All it takes is for the site to become, say, too slow, insufficiently mobile friendly, or refusing to adopt the newest of ever-changing "recommendations" from our overlords.

Finally, Thork is correct. This is the time of year where things go a bit quiet. It's not worth obsessing over.

This is why the populist approach of latching to the first explanation that seems to make sense is not only useless, but downright unhelpful to everyone involved.

[Dr David Thork]

Also a look at the analytics is probably more of a clue than just new posts.

https://www.similarweb.com/website/tfes.org?utm_source=addon&utm_medium=chrome&utm_content=header&utm_campaign=cta-button&from_ext=1

[Pete Svarrior]

I am splitting this out of the FE2FE discussion thread. Stack, I can't split your post in half - if you'd like to restate your points on the believers section in the old thread, please feel free to.

Also, the thread title of "Forum usage statistics" is just a rough attempt at me cataloguing this split discussion - please feel free to rename as appropriate.

[stack]

Our post count gets hit harder in the summer than the other site ... because we have lives and go outside.

Taking New Posts numbers from June of 2018 and comparing them to June of 2019, I found a 15% drop-off at TheFlatEarthSociey.com. However, at TFES.org, I found a whopping 142% drop-off. Probably means nothing as I simply picked 'New Posts' as a metric and maybe it's the wrong one.

It probably means you are hopeless at maths.

Let's put the numbers aside for a second and just apply a little logic. How can you possibly have a 142% drop in posts? 100% drop would be from however many you had to zero. This is like a sportsman saying during interviews that they gave 110%. You can't give more than 100% effort, nor can you have more than a 100% drop in the number of something. That's what percentage means ... out of 100. You can't say out of 100 the number I pick is 142.

Correct, I am hopeless at math. Though you can have more than double of something on the upside. For instance on the increase side of things, if June 2018 # of new posts was 200 and June 2019 # of new posts was 500, that would be increase of 150%.

However, I am hopeless at Excel too, had the wrong formula. Fixed:

[Dr David Thork]

However, I am hopeless at Excel too, had the wrong formula. Fixed:

No, it isn't fixed.

Take the very top result. 100 reduced to 35. That is very easy ... it is a 65% drop. Somehow you got 53% drop. But 35 is not 47% of 100. It is 35%. Obviously.

Your formula should have started =100-($B1*(100/$A1)) and if you had dragged that down the flux capacitor would have begun to whir and that's what makes time travel possible. Well that and 1.21 Gigawatts (pronounced jiggawats). Of course the only way to get that kind of power is from a bolt of lightning. Unfortunately you never know when or where its going to strike.

Sorry ... I was hanging a clock in my toilet and I slipped and hit my head. When I came to, I knew the answers to your spreadsheet.

[stack]

However, I am hopeless at Excel too, had the wrong formula. Fixed:

No, it isn't fixed.

Take the very top result. 100 reduced to 35. That is very easy ... it is a 65% drop. Somehow you got 53% drop. But 35 is not 47% of 100. It is 35%. Obviously.

Your formula should have started =100-($B1*(100/$A1)) and if you had dragged that down the flux capacitor would have begun to whir and that's what makes time travel possible. Well that and 1.21 Gigawatts (pronounced jiggawats). Of course the only way to get that kind of power is from a bolt of lightning. Unfortunately you never know when or where its going to strike.

Sorry ... I was hanging a clock in my toilet and I slipped and hit my head. When I came to, I knew the answers to your spreadsheet.

You should hit your head more often because you're right. The first 2 in the TFES column were using the formula from the other society column, copy and paste error on my part. I double checked the rest, they seem like they were using the appropriate calculations.

It would be interesting to see the web stats you posted but comparing with June 18 - June 19.

[Pete Svarrior]

I have to ask again - what are you hoping to achieve here?

Yes, we've had fewer posts last month than we did in each of the past few months. So what? It's a useless data point, and you seem to just be staring at it while hrmming loudly.

The numbers are hardly unusual if you look at a broader timespan instead of fixating on one month. As I've pointed out to you personally before, you're mistaking us coming out of a media surge and settling into normality for... something. You're not really saying what. And if we get another surge shortly, will you stop finding it "interesting"?

Just stating that it's "interesting" repeatedly doesn't make it so. Explain what you're thinking about, and why you're thinking about it. Address the issues with your statistical analysis. I dunno, do something that actually makes this a discussion.

[BrownRobin]

I have to ask again - what are you hoping to achieve here?

Yes, we've had fewer posts last month than we did in each of the past few months. So what? It's a useless data point, and you seem to just be staring at it while hrmming loudly.

The numbers are hardly unusual if you look at a broader timespan instead of fixating on one month. As I've pointed out to you personally before, you're mistaking us coming out of a media surge and settling into normality for... something. You're not really saying what. And if we get another surge shortly, will you stop finding it "interesting"?

Just stating that it's "interesting" repeatedly doesn't make it so. Explain what you're thinking about, and why you're thinking about it. Address the issues with your statistical analysis. I dunno, do something that actually makes this a discussion.

Although I am a RE'er, I would tend to agree with Pete. Providing a Year over Year statistic to compare differences in perhaps forum usage is not really a good indicator of anything really since there could be many possible sources of "noise" or variation. Next year or year after, numbers could go the opposite way.

While I don't agree with FE belief's, if your trying to use your statistical sheet to show a decline in FE community, its likely a poor indicator of anything, much like useless pole data for Presidential candidates.