ZooChat has 800,000 posts and 9,700 members

Simon Hampel

Simon Hampel

Administrator
Staff member
20+ year member
Last night we passed 800,000 posts on ZooChat and we're closing in on 10,000 members too.

The total number of user registrations is actually a lot higher - over 14,500 - but the figure quoted on the website in the forum stats only includes members whose accounts are still valid (ie still operational and not banned).

I'll post some stats and charts shortly.
 
Posts per month

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I'm a bit annoyed that I can't customise the number of vertical gridlines on this type of chart in Google sheets - would be much more useful to see a line ever year. But I think you get the idea anyway.
 
Posts per year

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As you can see, the site really started to take off in 2008.

This data includes comments made on photos - which is the main reason why total post count is down significantly this year - the number of comments has dropped dramatically with the lack of new media comment search facilities. I do hope to rectify that.
 
Photos uploaded per month

upload_2017-5-18_13-7-6.png

I can't recall what happened around 2010, whether it was a change of forum software or hosting provider which made things easier to upload photos in bulk - or just more enthusiastic members joining and uploading photos!

That all lead to the "Great Purge" of 2010 which saw over 25,000 photos deleted due to an emergency situation with disk space restrictions (back then, disk space for hosting providers was incredibly expensive). I still regret that event to this day - you can read more about it here: Missing Photos

Note that those photos that were purged do not show in the chart - so the data in the chart before October 2010 doesn't reflect the actual number of photos that were uploaded.

So the large spike in late 2010 will be from people busily uploading new photos to replace the ones that were removed (once the hosting issues had been resolved).

FWIW, I'm now running ZooChat on a server that is literally 4x more expensive than it requires for the traffic we get, simply so that I have enough disk space for all the photos. I'm hoping that the upcoming new release of the forum software later this year will make it easy to have photos automatically migrated to bulk storage such as Amazon S3, which will remove all space limitations and it won't matter (as much) how many photos we upload.

Ironically, about the same time I expect that solution from our software provider, my hosting provider is likely to offer a different solution - so I may well be spoilt for choice.
 
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User registrations per month

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Not sure what caused the peak in late 2014. May have been bot registrations ... but most of those were cleaned up and are no longer in the database, so I'm not quite sure.
 
It seems there is quite a lot of seasonal variation, but laid over that is a lot more data. I imagine that the activity spikes correspond to the opening of new exhibit complexes at major zoos?
 
FunkyGibbon said:
It seems there is quite a lot of seasonal variation, but laid over that is a lot more data. I imagine that the activity spikes correspond to the opening of new exhibit complexes at major zoos?
Click to expand...

There is probably an element of that but I'm not sure how much influence it has on the overall stats.

I find on most of my sites that there is always a drop off at Christmas time - especially in Southern hemisphere countries where that corresponds to the start of the summer holiday period.

I'm not sure how pronounced that is here though (summer drop off) since a lot of our members would presumably be out visiting zoos during the warmer months and so traffic wouldn't necessarily drop much? Difficult to tell.
 
Simon Hampel said:
Posts per year

View attachment 307457

As you can see, the site really started to take off in 2008.

This data includes comments made on photos - which is the main reason why total post count is down significantly this year - the number of comments has dropped dramatically with the lack of new media comment search facilities. I do hope to rectify that.
Click to expand...

I have found the new media search works well now so all new comments and new pictures.

not sure if that was spilt previously but I am happy as the alerts tell me if there is a new comment on a photo I have commented.

Took me a while to get used to the forum change :p
 
Daily active users (ie how many members have logged on at least once that day)

upload_2017-5-18_15-38-36.png

This data only goes back to when we launched the new version of the site in October 2016.

Nice steady growth in active user counts.

Dec 17 was a forum outage when we got hit with a DoS attack on our web server - Forum outage
 
Weekly post likes.

upload_2017-5-18_15-44-31.png

People are "liking" more content!

Given this is a new feature - it's not surprising it's taken a while for people to start using it more.
 
Note that all of the following charts are for both members and guests (who aren't logged in).

Sessions (visits) by country since Jan 2005

upload_2017-5-18_15-59-18.png
 
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Users by country - since Jan 2005

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We have a lot more users visiting from the US, but they don't do as much on the site as those from the UK!
 
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