Surfing Dirt forum stats
As I’m finally getting around to playing with data visualisation a bit, I decided to try a real-life exercice: rendering data from the old Surfing Dirt forum, the one that was started over 10 years ago, before I gave it a new home.
So I extracted data from the salvaged database, and came up with 3 things I wanted to see:
- new topics per week
- new posts per week
- total amount of posts per user for the top 20 or so
Turns out it wasn’t too hard, just a little time-consuming. D3’s cool!
New topics per week
Things started out really well for Surfing Dirt, 30 topics per week for a small community is not shabby at all!
The downwards trend started pretty early on, but it took a while for Surfing Dirt to really start suffering from the Facebook forum drain.
Posts per week
This graph looks a lot like the other, but in the end, when the forum was slowing down, it looks like new posts slowed down faster than new topics. I imagine this means that there were fewer engaging discussions, but a few people kept posting new things, just less successfully for the site.
At some point in 2016, before I took it over and re-hosted it, the site went down for months. Re-hosting happened too late, the damage was done. Sad!
Posts per user
What to say here other than McCarver's got a big mouth?