As we close out 2018, I thought it would be interesting to look at some stats for the year on ZooChat. Let's start with Posts vs media comments per day (28 day moving averages) Same data, but adding posts and media comments per day in a stacked chart to give overall totals: Not sure what happened in October? Possibly the opposite of whatever happened in April? Interestingly, on my other sites, we get a huge dip in December due to Christmas - but ZooChat just keeps going strong at this time of year.
Posts vs media comments per month Stacking them to give overall totals: Posts + media comments per month
These data look fishy; I don't really think that posts and comments should track each other so religiously, and I don't really think that we get more comments than posts. Is it possible that 'comments' somehow includes posts?
Given that photos tend to be uploaded in large dumps - at the end of trips, say - you’d expect the ratio of new comments to new posts to fluctuate much more than is shown in the graphs, and to be correlated much more closely to new media uploads than to new posts.
I had difficulty finding a good way of representing posts vs media comments for longer yearly charts, so I did a few of them. First up, just posts per year: 2018 was our biggest year ever for forum posts - huge jump! Next, media comments per year: Notice the sharp drop off in 2017 when we migrated to the new software Now, stack those previous two charts together to get overall yearly volume: Finally, I've done a stacked percentage chart, which shows us a comparison of what percentage of overall post volume was from posts vs from media comments. Note that in 2010, 2011 and 2014 more than 50% of our "post" content was from media comments
It's a stacked chart - the comments are added to the posts to give a total overall. Basically, I'm treating comments are a form of post (indeed, in the old version of the site - comments literally were posts), so it's the overall total which is significant. You can see in the most recent "Posts + media comments per year", for quite a few years we had a similar number of comments to posts - indeed in 2010 media comments outnumbered posts 55,000 to 40,000. Since the move to the new forum software, comments have dropped off significantly - although interestingly, post volumes are up strongly this year.
Ha! That makes a lot more sense Although as CGSwans says I'm now surprised that comments are so consistent.
Given just how many photos get uploaded on a monthly basis, you'll find that it averages out overall - comment volume likely is related to media upload volume (I can do a chart for that if you like) - but on a month-by-month basis, it's all probably fairly consistent and wouldn't fluctuate as much as you might think. Will get to the media per day/month/year charts shortly which should be interesting.
For me this is because Christmas is the one holiday I have a year where I'm not travelling -i.e. I have more spare time to post than usual. Maybe it's the same with others too?
I've gone back and added Posts vs Media comments charts which more clearly shows the relationship there (ie there isn't really any relationship between posts and media comments). Will do the same for monthly and yearly charts.
In Australia, Christmas is our main holiday period - school is out for 6 weeks or more over summer and many people go away. Combined with the fact that many of the people using my other sites (PropertyChat in particular) do so from work - it's not surprising that traffic drops off significantly over Christmas when everyone takes some time off. Of course, on ZooChat - summer just means more reasons to visit zoos (and then post about the visits!), so there doesn't seem to be any dropoff in mid year for northern hemisphere summer.
I think this is a credit to the work of a lot of posters in the past year or two to actively curate good content. The various photographic guides, lintworm’s must-see zoos thread, some excellent trip threads and various games and competitions have created something of a renaissance here. Three or four years ago ZooChat had become a little boring, at least to me - it seemed at risk of becoming a glorified RSS feed for zoo birth press releases. Now it’s a creative and thought-provoking space, and I think that’s a wonderful thing.
I agree totally - there have been quite a few members (both moderators and regular members) who have stepped up and created some genuinely high quality threads which has really engaged our membership and driven most of this increase in post volume. Combined with the fact that I think our moderator workload has been pretty low recently - very few "issues" between members to be sorted out. The mods are still very busy - but they are spending their time curating content and advising me on the direction of the site rather than sorting out squabbles, which is great. Heaps of discussion happens behind the scenes - a lot of it in the last 12 months around site policies and content management strategies. I think we've made fantastic progress recently (thanks mods!) and I'm working hard to get the new site built which will allow us to fully implement the things we're hoping to achieve.
My hypothesis for the October drop is that it's related to the end of the summer holidays for students in the Northern Hemisphere. The drop seems to start just after the start of September and slowly decrease which seems to fit the idea that it's younger members posting less after their summer holidays are over.
Media uploads per day Did people do some big trips in March/April 2018? Curious about the big spike there. The uptrend from June - Sept is understandable due to northern hemisphere summer. So now to the question of "is there any correlation between media comments and media uploads?" Answer: not really? perhaps a little!? I think the reality is that most uploaded photos don't get many comments - so if there is any correlation, it is masked by the high volume of photo uploads. There might be more of a correlation visible if I wasn't using moving averages (the spike in comments after uploads is likely to happen in the days immediately after the upload - while a 28 day moving average kind of hides that) ... however, when I tried generating a chart from the raw data, the day-to-day fluctuations were so high that it was pretty much impossible to see any trends at all. Back when our comment volumes were much higher I have no doubt there would have been a closer correlation between media uploads and media comments.
Media uploads per month Nothing terribly surprising here - slump during northern hemisphere winter is pretty obvious.
Media uploads per year Quite a strong uptick in photo upload activity in the last few years and 50% higher than in 2015
New user registrations per day ("valid" users only - meaning: users who have fully completed the registration process including email validation - and also have not been banned or had emails bounce back as undeliverable)
I have a feeling that we had a lot of photos from @ThylacineAlive (who had been on a trip throughout the southern USA in January/February but took a month or two to upload his photos) and @vogelcommando in that month also, this is around the time Chli and myself started doing photographic guides so there may have been an increase in photo uploads specifically for the purpose of filling gaps.
