State of the Forums - late March 2019

[hazeleyes]

As we close out the first quarter of 2019, I thought I’d share some interesting data about our forum. Let’s start by looking at the activity here:

Metric	Last 7d	Last 30d	All Time
User visits	577	2.2k	46.3k
New users	63	90	1.4k
Posts	613	2.5k	56.1k
Likes	617	3.0k	60.9k
Flags	7	20	688
Pageviews	28.0k	121k	2.4M

The chart below shows the pageviews over the past 90 days and also breaks out views by logged-in users (bright blue), anonymous users (dark blue), and crawlers (red):

The graphs below give a quick look at the overall “health” of our community. In the upper right of each graph, the upward green arrow shows improvement in nearly every metric. Even the Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users graph shows an overall upward trend over the past quarter; the goal for that graph is to maintain a ratio of at least 30%. The Daily Engaged Users trend is also upward overall, but that’s one metric where I’d like to see some improvement. (As it measures users who interact with the site, you can help by posting, replying, and liking!)

So with hundreds of user visits and tens of thousands of pageviews a week, where is all this activity coming from? The map below shows that just over half of our traffic (~ 54%) is generated by users in the US:

Excluding the US, here’s where the rest of our users are located, with the blue shading increasing in proportion to activity:

Let’s take a look at our users next. For a site that focuses on a mobile game, it should be no surprise that the overwhelming majority of folks visit our site using a phone or a tablet:

iOS users make up the vast majority of those who visit our site, and the mobile version of Safari is by far the dominant browser people use to view the forum:

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[DIMTI]

Seeing 60+ new users in the past week alone is honestly really nice to see. I’ve certainly noticed some of them recently, but I really didn’t expect that many to join. Hopefully some of them stick around, getting new viewpoints is interesting.

[NinjaBryden]

Awesome to see the forums growing like this! Hopefully we get more people that create memes so we can have a dedicated meme sub category :^)

[steaf]

in fact. it is difficult to find this vg community.
especially some places don’t speak English.
i am a China player. fortunately i find it💛
(i may have some Grammatical problem​:slightly_frowning_face: )

[DIMTI]

Yeah, as discussed in the past, we’re inherently disadvantaged in terms of exposure due to factors such as a lack of a formal, official acknowledgement of this community from SEMC (because we’re fan-run and they’ll only want to promote the official communities), relatively specific search terms needed to find this site via search engines, and, as you said, language barriers, among many other reasons. It sucks that we’ll likely never reach the size that the other communities have, but that’s the cost of being fan-run.

[MacAulay]

This is good! More importantly to me though, what I cannot stress enough is how non-toxic these forums are, especially compared to other VG communities I’ve seen. Everybody is friendly, everybody values each other’s opinions. Nice thread Hazel!

Also call me an idiot but what are “crawlers”? (The red bar in the pageviews graph)

[hazeleyes]

@MacAulay

what are “crawlers”? (The red bar in the pageviews graph)

They’re scripts or programs that traverse web sites by following links in order to build a searchable index for each site. Legitimate crawlers are from search engines such as Google, researchers, etc. but there are lots of others out there for unknown or – increasingly – nefarious purposes.