ZooChat is 18 years old!

FBBird said:
…..which would be worrying, as it might tend to dumb down the whole thing. Or even uplifting, showing how many younger people are interested:)
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Given the membership of ZooChat is not static - it would also gradually increase over time. By the time ZooChat gets to 50 years old, one would suggest that the majority of members would be younger :rolleyes:

It's also a pretty meaningless statistic - and given I don't capture accurate age information for all members - also largely impossible to calculate.
 
Simon Hampel said:
Given the membership of ZooChat is not static - it would also gradually increase over time. By the time ZooChat gets to 50 years old, one would suggest that the majority of members would be younger :rolleyes:

It's also a pretty meaningless statistic - and given I don't capture accurate age information for all members - also largely impossible to calculate.
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By the time zoochat gets 50 years old I’ll be 55 :eek:
 
Congratulations and happy birthday ZooChat!! I've been lurking here since ~2013 or earlier, but I only started actively posting and really engaging with the community on a personal level in the last couple of months or so.

It's a little embarrassing to get so sappy and ruin the mood but for me, being here and able to actively engage in my lifelong passion for zoos again after a long time was a huge stepping stone towards recovering from a really traumatic period of my life. I definitely know very little in comparison to basically everyone here but I've still been given so much kindness and support from a lot of the members, so I'm especially grateful to have zoochat around and I think it's been an irreplaceable part of my life :oops:

A huge thank you to Simon and everyone else involved for building and growing this masterpiece!! Here's to the next 18 years!

Also, #OlderThanZooChatGang :D
 
B2. Posts and media comments per day (90 day moving averages)

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We treat posts and media comments as the same in totals.

In the previous version of the forum (prior to Oct 2016), media comments literally were posts and were not differentiated like they are in the current software.

For the newer members, the dramatic drop off in media comments in 2016 corresponds to the move to the new forum software (from vBulletin+PhotoPost to XenForo) which doesn't give us the same ability to see newly updated media comments that the old software did. This has been addressed in the new version of the XenForo forum software that we'll be moving to shortly.

The strong growth in posts over the past 18 months or so has been largely an abberation driven by some lengthy threads in the fantasy forum and isn't really representative of long term post volumes. We seem to be reverting back to more normal levels now.
 

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B3. Posts and media comments per month (3 month moving averages)

I'm not going to bother posting this - because it largely mirrors the charts from B2 above.

B4. Posts and media comments per year

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B5. New threads started per day (90 day moving average)

Not going to bother with this one - since it largely mirrors the following chart.

B6. New threads started per month (3 month moving average)

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Curiously, given most of our discussions tend to be contained in the zoo news threads - we probably don't get as many new threads created as on other forums.

You'll also probably note a spike in new thread creation just after the beginning of each new year - from those same zoo news threads!
 

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B8. Media uploads per day (90 day moving average)

Not going to bother with this one - since it largely mirrors the following chart.

B9. Media uploads per month (3 month moving average)

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I’m seeing a significant drop in posts in 2016 and 2017 on a lot of these charts - do you have any idea what caused that?
 
birdsandbats said:
I’m seeing a significant drop in posts in 2016 and 2017 on a lot of these charts - do you have any idea what caused that?
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Simon Hampel said:
For the newer members, the dramatic drop off in media comments in 2016 corresponds to the move to the new forum software (from vBulletin+PhotoPost to XenForo) which doesn't give us the same ability to see newly updated media comments that the old software did. This has been addressed in the new version of the XenForo forum software that we'll be moving to shortly.
Click to expand...
 
B11. New user registrations per day (90 day moving average)

Not going to bother with this one - since it largely mirrors the following chart.

B12. New user registrations per month (3 month moving average)

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"Users" include:
  • actual valid users (of course)
  • users who were valid and have posted, but have been banned (ie not spammers)
  • users who were valid and have posted, but are no longer valid because their email has bounced (ie not fake bot accounts)
  • users who were valid, but are no longer valid because they changed their email address and have yet to confirm that change
  • users whose accounts have been voluntarily disabled
This is why the total number of users listed in the first post is different to the number in the sidebar on the site - the one in the sidebar only shows currently valid users. For example, any user whose email bounces back as undeliverable is removed from the "valid" user list, until that issue is fixed.

I still haven't worked out what happened in 2016. We didn't migrate to the new forum software until October 2016, so it wasn't that.

Note also that registration data isn't entirely complete. Several times in the past I have gone through a purging process to remove old/invalid users from the database. Typically this was users who had never posted and hadn't been online in several years, plus users whose account was never activated or users whose account was disabled because their email address was no longer valid - and again, they had never posted. There would also have been some spam users removed.

So as a result, the registrations per day chart above actually only shows currently valid users plus more recent no-longer-valid registrations as per the above list.

The actual daily registration figures historically would be quite a bit higher - especially given that we have nearly 10,000 members who have registered but are not considered "valid" users (in that they either cannot post, or their account has already been purged from the system).
 

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