Quote Originally Posted by arwkrite View Post
Back to Stats...late 06 & early 07 was a bit of a disaster. What was that due to ? Sunspots or the Great Beer and Lager Drought ?
Sorry about my slow reply to this!

That is a good spot, the raw stats we have here do make it look like a bit of a disaster but that doesn't quite tell the whole story.

In August 2006 we launched a totally redesigned version of the site. The old version was in a word rubbish (I think I'm allowed to say that since it was largely my fault!)

One of the things I did with the old version was to place a big link slap bang in the middle of every single page telling people to register on the site - I think perhaps many of the people signing up at that point were expecting to find there would be more information available once they did, which there wasn't, so most of them never contributed and probably never came back!

Once we launched the new version we were a lot more subtle about telling people to sign up, as in only when they actually wanted to interact with it. So at that point fewer people were doing so but at least they understood why they were doing it and more of them went on to contribute in some way.

So oddly enough while that period doesn't look good it marked the start of us getting quality over quantity when it comes to new members and was when the site really started to come to life.