June 14th. Huge Spike?

[hgroberts]

Can anyone think of a way to explain the huge jump in membership on June 14, did it have to do anything with the apparent down time, three days later?

Also a big jump in membership, obviously new people on the board posting, but why? how did all of these people find the board at once?

Also a tremendous jump in april.

These stats mistfy me, anyone have any ideas? Could it be a computer error?
Not exactly sure were to put this thread, if mods feel it needs moving then go right ahead.

 

[HowardE]

Big boards.com is not accurate... we don't provide them a feed.

There was no down time in June either...

The June 14th "spike" is obviously inaccurate, since we didn't break 100,000 members until after July 1.

Did we have no posts between Oct and March?

 

[The Chairman]

None of the agencies that report on such things are ever entirely accurate. They often extrapolate and infer when there is not apparent data available to them. Sometimes it makes you look GREAT and at times it makes you look not so great!

I can assure you that there are no other forums or web sites dedicated to Scuba that are even close to us. At least, none that we are aware of. That's why most of the BIG e-tailers advertise on us: they know where to find divers!

 

[Ted S]

Big Boards has been around for a long time now and works in two ways; first they poll sites every night in an attempt to figure out how many members they have (i.e. what's the count shown to the public). Secondly they offer forums the ability to get more detailed stats with a tracking feed that measure visitors and other metrics. Years ago ScubaBoard opted in to this tool so you'll see some data way back.

Unfortunately these days big boards isn't maintained as closely as some would hope so between site changes (moving the url of a forum for example) and their own technical issues and outages, reporting is not always perfect. They also have difficulty adjusting when forums remove posts which ScubaBoard does periodically so they don't properly chart the drop and corresponding re-growth. There's nothing extrapolated or special about their data -- it's just what their spider sees, problem is, they don't always see it. As a result some days they'll reach out and miss sites and get them the next day which makes it look like there are big peaks and valleys in the chart when their aren't.

It's a good source to get an idea of things but unfortunately not accurate enough anymore to base any analysis off of.

 

[HowardE]

We changed the link to the forum in september from scubaboard.com/forums.php to scubaboard.com/forums/index.php ... thus the dropping of the stats.

Bigboards.com says they take 1-2 years to update their listings unless we pay them some kind of bribe money to have a response within a few days.

In a nutshell... Bigboards.com is not a good place to gauge metrics. quantcast.com or alexa.com is more reliable.

 

[Ted S]

Haha. That's a long wait!

Alexa has improved from their original methodology but it's still not something I'd put money on. You may want to look at Compete.com as well Quantcast, although as Netdoc said, those sort of rating sites aren't going to be dead on... it's just one piece of information. Neilsen, Comscore and Hitwise do a better job using a variety of panels and large samples but none of those offer data to the public.

Although now I'm really getting off topic... the number of members on the site should really speak for its self.

 

[HowardE]

compete.com has us ranked 34,260. I like that better than our Alexa of 42,141... but not as much as our quantcast ranking of 12,652.

 

[The Chairman]

Howard has done a wonderful job with SEO on ScubaBoard this past year. He has really made a world of difference in propelling us to being THE most popular Scuba Site and Forum. Thanks Howard!