Friday Stats: April 2010

[Dave M]

A week later than planned (I got somewhat distracted by election fever last week) here are the stats for April.

There were 134,000 visits to the site, so a touch down on the 137,000 in March but happily well up on the 116,000 in April 2009.

Activity on the site was:-
4,742 photos of 1,559 pubs
1,161 reviews added of which 662 were virgin reviews
358 new pubs suggested
485 map points corrected
315 web links suggested
155 new users joined
53 beer festivals suggested
188 pubs reported closed
21 pubs reported open

This compares to April 2009 when we had:-
5,037 photos of 1,621 pubs
434 reviews added
359 new pubs suggested
494 map points corrected
228 web links suggested
128 new users joined
60 beer festivals suggested

So overall most of the activity is on a similar level to last year, with the obvious exception of the number of reviews which continue to be much higher.

On the forums there were 1,433 new posts, which is of course a huge improvement on April 2009 when we had a total of 31. Down a bit on last month though, which I guess is partly due to the fact that we are handling more corrections directly on the main site and partly because the weather was quite nice and people were just at the pub rather than being on here!

[Andy Ven]

It makes me realise just how much time and effort you chaps put into keeping a site like this going (I know we contributors play our part too).

I don't understand why you don't yet have the same profile as BitE but I hope that through the forum etc the site continues to grow and gain greater prominence because, in my opinion, it is more user friendly, more responsive to users' queries and needs, and better presented.

Just one query, can the figures also be used to generate a contributors' league table for each month - number of photos contributed (only count each pub once) and reviews contributed?

[Conrad]

We can certainly look at doing a contributor's league, it would be nice to put it onto the main site, I think it has been suggested before. I am going through the site at the moment tidying up the pages (the front page is now pretty much rewritten and hopefully cleaner), it may be a good time to try and add the contributor's onto the pages as a all time ranking and last month ranking, we could also show it by town then as well which would be nice to show how members were influencing their areas.

I honestly think the key difference between us and BITE now in terms of performance is the Google position, it is both amazing and bemusing just how key it is to have a strong search position hence we are trying to slowly raise our profile in Google with ideas like the CAMRA link exchange.

To echo your nice sentiments though I do think as a community we are far friendlier and more positive, this thread this month has already been a stand out for me, with Pangolin providing some really great feedback. I do enjoy seeing people posting links to other sites more and more on our forum allowing you all to promote useful resources. And also that me and Dave have been able to help out John McGraw this month by sending him all our copies of his images after he had a critical system failure that destroyed his copies. I hope we neither outgrow this personality or fade into nothing.