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ZooChat is 15 years old!

Discussion in 'Announcements' started by Simon Hampel, 18 Oct 2018.

  1. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    ZooChat was launched (originally as "ZooBeat") 15 years ago today - 19th October 2003 ... happy birthday!

    We are currently just under 895,000 posts and have 5,400 active members.

    "active" means they are valid accounts who are able to post if they choose - ie not banned/disabled/waiting for email activation/etc - and their email addresses are still valid (ie emails have not bounced back as undeliverable). We have actually had over 15,500 users register for the site - but that number will include spammers and users who are no longer active because they were either banned, or their emails bounce and so their accounts get deactivated.

    I am really busy at the moment working on the upgrade to the next version of the forum software, which is a complete rewrite from the ground up - so all my customisations need to be rebuilt. But that's okay, because the new version is a great platform for developing new features and functionality on, so I'm looking forward to adding a lot of new stuff to the site in the next 12 months.

    PS. new version supports unicode emojis, so the birthday cake emoji I tried to add to this post will actually work once I upgrade :D

    I'll post some forum stats over the course of the day today.

    Some history:

    19 Oct 2003 first thread welcoming people to ZooChat: Welcome !

    20 Oct 2008 announcement about the relaunch: Welcome to ZooChat!

    21 Oct 2016 announcement about the relaunch: Welcome to the new ZooChat

    23 Oct 2016 thread showing history of what the website looked like: Happy Birthday ZooChat

    18 May 2017 last set of stats published: ZooChat has 800,000 posts and 9,700 members
     
  2. TheGerenuk

    TheGerenuk Well-Known Member 5+ year member

    Joined:
    8 Sep 2017
    Posts:
    2,870
    Location:
    Brampton, Ontario, Canada
    Wow, 15 years? That's impressive!
     
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  3. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Posts per day - since launch (90 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_14-36-18.png
     
    Last edited: 19 Oct 2018
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  4. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Posts per day - last 12 months (28 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_15-36-6.png
     
    Last edited: 19 Oct 2018
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  5. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Media comments per day - since launch (90 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_15-29-14.png

    Notice the huge dropoff in comments in late 2016? That corresponds to the migration from vBulletin+PhotoPost to XenForo+Media Gallery.

    Previously, we treated photos like threads and so comments were basically posts and showed up in a New Comments search (just like New Posts).

    The version of the Media Gallery we current run does not support this - there is no way to see photos which have been commented on.

    However the new version of XenForo we are migrating to in coming months will get us a bit closer to what we used to have. I still hope to make further improvements to the gallery to make it as usable as it was previously.
     
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  6. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Media comments per day - last 12 months (28 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_15-40-59.png
     
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  7. Arizona Docent

    Arizona Docent Well-Known Member 15+ year member

    Joined:
    10 Feb 2009
    Posts:
    7,702
    Location:
    Arizona, USA
    Well Happy Birthday ZooChat and a HUGE thank you to Simon for all the hard work he puts in (and for having enough confidence in me to ask me to join the moderation team).
     
    Jambo, BigNate, ZooBinh and 2 others like this.
  8. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Posts + comments per day - since launch (90 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_15-49-35.png

    Since we used to treat comments as posts - I figured it would be useful to show them as combined data
     
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  9. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Posts + comments per day - last 12 months (28 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_15-59-53.png
     
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  10. Jaxton

    Jaxton Well-Known Member 5+ year member

    Joined:
    16 Feb 2017
    Posts:
    402
    Location:
    United States
    HAPPY BIRTHDAY ZOOCHAT!
     
  11. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
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    Location:
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    Posts per month - last 60 months

    upload_2018-10-19_17-3-24.png
     
  12. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Posts + comments per month - last 60 months

    upload_2018-10-19_22-36-29.png
     
    Last edited: 19 Oct 2018
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  13. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Posts per year - since launch

    upload_2018-10-19_22-19-58.png
     
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  14. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Media comments per year - since launch

    upload_2018-10-19_22-26-2.png
     
    Jambo, TheGerenuk and ZooBinh like this.
  15. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Posts + comments per year - since launch

    upload_2018-10-19_22-40-41.png
     
    Last edited: 19 Oct 2018
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  16. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Media uploads per day - since launch (90 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_22-47-45.png
     
  17. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Media uploads per day - last 12 months (28 day moving average)

    upload_2018-10-19_22-50-28.png
     
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  18. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
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    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Media uploads per month - last 5 years

    upload_2018-10-19_22-55-18.png
     
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  19. snowleopard

    snowleopard Well-Known Member 15+ year member Premium Member

    Joined:
    1 Dec 2007
    Posts:
    7,583
    Location:
    Abbotsford, B.C., Canada
    What a wonderful set of statistics on this thread...kudos to @Simon Hampel for creating such an amazing website. I joined 11 years ago and I've obviously been extremely active here and hopefully ZooChat will be around for a long time to come.
     
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  20. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Administrator Staff Member 20+ year member

    Joined:
    18 Oct 2003
    Posts:
    4,026
    Location:
    Sydney, Australia
    Media uploads per year

    upload_2018-10-19_22-58-53.png

    It's been surprisingly consistent over the last 8 years!
     
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