Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by NCommander on Friday June 27 2014, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the finally-an-NCommander-post-with-<1k-words! dept.
So, given we've recently managed to find a good middle ground on the subscription front, I thought it would be nice to end the week with a lighthearted subject most of you care about.

STATISTICS!

As most of you are likely aware, we've been running piWik on SN for the last few weeks to get a better idea of what our general traffic looks like. We've learned quite a few interesting things from it, and I figured the community would love to take a look at the report itself. So, without further ado: piWik Statistics Report for mid-June. (warning: PDF file, the HTML output had far too many images to easily copy it off piWik and rehost it somewhere else, and there was no ASCII report that I could find).So, hopefully now most of you have taken a good look through the PDF. Its been fascinating watching the various trends of traffic, as well as getting an idea of the breakdown of mobile/desktop, various OS usage, and so-forth. First, a couple of notes:
  • For whatever reason, piWik groups Ubuntu separately from Linux, and it shows up as "Unknown" in the OS families list. I think this is a side-effect from one of the plugins we're using, but I'm not 100% sure.
  • Second, there are no referrals listed in the report; I specifically excluded them. There are two simple reasons: we get almost no inbound traffic from third-party sources (our top referral was Google searches at 114), and secondly, a fair number of users here have custom launch portals for themselves (basically an HTML page with links), who, due to our virtually non-existent referrals, show up in the top 25.
  • HTTPS traffic is excluded due to certificate issues, as there are users who have DNT set. If you use NoScript, it sets DNT automatically, even if you enable scripts globally. Furthermore, my original post about non-JS users being excluded was in error, there is a hidden image that cause those users to show up.
  • A few pages on the site don't include the footer template, causing hits to be slightly lower than they should be because of that.

So, with any bunch of data, we can start to draw some reasonable conclusions from it. Here's what I got, I'd love to hear your opinions below:

  • Slashcode's internal statistics monitor is badly out of touch of reality; it reports our traffic is 80% higher than piWik does. This might be an artificat of bitrot, varnish, or something else entirely.
  • I was kinda shocked to see how much of our traffic is based in the United States, I honestly though we had a more even distribution.
  • The lack of referrals is concerning; right now, we're roughly stable with the users in our community, but if you don't already know we exist, you aren't going to find us easily.

There's probably a lot more I could draw from this data, but I don't want to color the communities' impressions beside stating the obvious, so I'd like to hear what you think about it, and then go from there.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Woods on Friday June 27 2014, @07:03PM

    by Woods (2726) <woods12@gmail.com> on Friday June 27 2014, @07:03PM (#60995) Journal

    I think my favorite is seeing Firefox 29 drop off slowly as they released the 30 update.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1) by present_arms on Friday June 27 2014, @07:12PM

    by present_arms (4392) on Friday June 27 2014, @07:12PM (#61006) Homepage Journal

    Yo be honest i didn't catch that, yes that is interesting :)

    --
    http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
  • (Score: 1) by ticho on Friday June 27 2014, @07:19PM

    by ticho (89) on Friday June 27 2014, @07:19PM (#61011) Homepage Journal

    Why, did they fix at least some of the clusterfuck they made with 29? I haven't been following the development, but FF 29 has almost driven me to a different browser, only the "Classic Theme Restorer" addon saved it - and even with it it's worse than earlier releases.

    • (Score: 2) by Woods on Friday June 27 2014, @07:53PM

      by Woods (2726) <woods12@gmail.com> on Friday June 27 2014, @07:53PM (#61037) Journal

      I believe you may be mixed up. FF 30 was the UI update with all the horribleness that required the Classic Theme Restorer addon.

      I think the main reason why 29 was phased out is that if you went to check your current version of Firefox, it would auto-update to 30. Well, this happened for me, at least. Otherwise I would still be on 29, I am certain.

      • (Score: 2) by ticho on Friday June 27 2014, @08:11PM

        by ticho (89) on Friday June 27 2014, @08:11PM (#61056) Homepage Journal

        Really? Because I'm using 29.0.1 (Iceweasel, since I'm on Debian, but it should be the same), and without the CTR addon, it is barely usable. Are you telling me that 30 will be even worse? :)

        • (Score: 2) by Woods on Friday June 27 2014, @08:23PM

          by Woods (2726) <woods12@gmail.com> on Friday June 27 2014, @08:23PM (#61064) Journal

          Well, I was pretty sure, but I suppose I had v28 at the time of the update? I just checked when Australis was pushed, and sure enough it said 29.

          I am a dumb.

          • (Score: 1) by ticho on Friday June 27 2014, @10:15PM

            by ticho (89) on Friday June 27 2014, @10:15PM (#61144) Homepage Journal

            That's all right, we all have a dumb every now and then. :)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @08:12PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @08:12PM (#61059)

        Firefox updates whenever it gets around to it, checking your current version might also trigger it, but it is not the primary code path to updating since hardly anyone checks their browser version with any frequency.

        I find the increase in ff30 users to be completely unremarkable. It is simply the expected result of firefox's automatic update policy and we should expect to see the same thing when ff31 rolls around. Whatever you think of Australis, most people don't care enough to try to avoid it.

      • (Score: 1) by Gertlex on Friday June 27 2014, @09:26PM

        by Gertlex (3966) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 27 2014, @09:26PM (#61104)

        Might be worth checking out the PaleMoon fork of firefox. It's got the sanity we needed 5 years ago. (the stats indicated we have maybe 1 PaleMoon user for every 20 FF users currently.

    • (Score: 2) by elf on Saturday June 28 2014, @07:04AM

      by elf (64) on Saturday June 28 2014, @07:04AM (#61281)

      I don't use FF an awful lot but over the years of when I do I can't say I notice anything between the versions. It has a browser window, a URL bar and a bookmarks menu. Thats all I really use from it. Chrome is my main browser of choice and this is different only because it has a few plugins I like and syncs my book marks across machines.