It has been a year since the site's first day in Private Beta. Six months ago JAL proposed that we should have aimed to double our activity in the time between then and now. Let's see what we've achieved:
Page Views
Before
On the majority of days in the first six months of Retrocomputing, we had fewer than 1000 daily views (except for a period from the start of public beta to mid-way through June). Our minimum was 187 views in a day and our maximum was 8122 views.
After
On the majority of days in the past six months of Retrocomputing, we had fewer than 4000 daily views (except for a period in the first third of December). Our minimum was 253 views in a day, which occurred near the beginning of this period, and our maximum was 20505 views.
Posters of Questions & Answers
Before
There was a massive peak of activity at the beginning of private beta, which peaked at our record of 29 users posting in a day. There was also a smaller peak of activity leading up to the start of public beta, peaking at 18 posters in a day a few days after launch. Posting was cyclic for a few weeks after this, but later evened out - at around 2 or 3 users per day for the latter part of this six-month period.
After
Whilst we haven't managed to beat that initial 29 posters in a day, 21 users posted in one day in early January. I haven't cross-referenced posting patterns to other things - I expect it correlates to Hot Network Questions - but around 5 or 6 users have been posting each day so far this calendar year (on average).
Edits
Before
There was a massive block of editing in May and June but, after that, there weren't really many edits or suggested edits (except occasional single-user editathon days). Excluding anomalies and the initial spike, there were around 1 or 2 edits per day and the occasional suggested edit every few days.
After
Mini editathons have been smaller, but more frequent. Since January there have been around 2 edits per day. Suggested edits have become slightly more frequent, and suggested edits from unregistered users have become significantly more frequent.
Backlinks
This page of the Site Analytics makes little sense to me. From what I can see, it's measuring new people, or people who have not visited in x period of time, for some definition of "people". It also appears to count groups of people as being referred from multiple sites at once, or there are lots of coincidences, or it's rounding in a way that I don't understand at the moment.
Before
During this time period, almost 30% (11200) of our traffic came from search engines (all from Google and none from Bing, although Bing is listed implying that some people came from it...), and just over 10% (4200) of our traffic was direct. Just over 60% of our traffic was from referring sites. The main referring sites were Reddit (off-site breakdown) and Stack Overflow (Hot Network Questions?) at almost 10000 referrals each. Runners up were Ask Ubuntu, Super User and Twitter at over 1000 each (the former two probably Hot Network Questions).
After
During this time period, over 20% of our traffic (22000) came from search engines (all Google again, though "none" were from DuckDuckGo) and just over a quarter of our traffic was direct. Over half of our traffic (26500) was from referring sites. Most of this (37000) was from Stack Overflow (Hot Network Questions?), closely followed by Reddit (14000). Super User (3000) and Ask Ubuntu (1500) probably linked people here from the Hot Network Questions sidebar.
We've approximately doubled our activity by these criteria. As far as this data is concerned, we have achieved that goal. Hooray!
What should our next goal be? Make suggestions below; let's try to attain as many as possible!
