Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

In the last month Dakka has broken a few benchmarks that have been impressive enough that I've decided to share some of the secret stats with everyone. In this thread (most likely just in this first post), I'll run through some graphed versions of the stats I collect. All opinions that are not about Dakka are my personal conjecture and are to be taken as drunken rambling rather than anything factual. I do have (volunteered) access to data from other sites but have no permission to share it so stay quiet on those fronts.

First and foremost is the most significant of the graphs. This graph indicates the total average posts per day over a month for each site listed. I started collecting stats for Dakka when we launched the current version of the forum software to make sure I was not going to screw anything up, and monitored a number of other websites so that I could see the overall traffic trends for wargaming, and to ensure dakka could replicate anything that was especially successful elsewhere. Here is the graph:


There are a few things of note in the above graph. First off, I have cut out abnormalities like batch post archiving (which would cause some forums to lose thousands of posts per day) and replaced them with 0 values. If a 0 value is in place followed by a spike upwards, it means that the site in question was unavailable at the time of stat gathering so it gets skewed in the following month's data. There are dozens of caveats in the above data as all forums are operated differently. Any with automated post archiving or removal will have lower scores than they should. Any that include RSS feeds for posts, post lots of automated messages or suffer from lots of spamming are inclined to have higher scores than the average. Registration and login simplicity is also a factor, as is anything that is done to encourage registrations (like Dakka's extra advert for guest users).

I'll dig into the stats in more detail later if people are interested, but I can only really offer personal conjecture and mention when sites were having technical difficulties. A few of the more interesting things of note are:
- last month dakka had more posts than any other site at any time I've been logging it (woo! - and it was not all down to Alpharius posting in the DCM naughty thread!).
- Warseer had severe server load issues in Nov/Dec 2008 and you can see the effect quite significantly in the graph
- Dakka launched our gallery in Dec 08
- You can watch Tau Online die as it got bought out by someone who ran it until the users rebelled and left (and started Second Sphere)

The forum choices are a bit odd in my graphs and I've added a few more each year. The reason for the choices is varied and I'm too lazy to go into it for now, but basically it comes down to sites that were doing something interesting that I wanted to watch or were some of the first results in google for warhammer or 40k forums at the time. Not including other forums (even if they are large) is not a personal thing, just that I am only after a general overview of the community, not every single forum.

So that is that graph. I've been tracking registrations as well but that is such a loaded figure it counts for almost nothing. Here is the graph for average number of signups per day:


I've smoothed it out a bit to hide Aug-Sep 2010 when 40kforums jumped up by 10K users as I think that is probably an artificial statistic, and if it isnt it skews the graph so much as to be unreadable. The graph above has loads of problems:
- Spam registrations vary a lot from site to site. Dakka can be as many as 5 per day sometimes!
- Some sites require registration to be useable (librarium online) which obviously causes a massive increase relative to traffic/other sites.
- Some times will report the user total as registrations, others will only report it as users who verified their email address after registering, giving quite a wide gulf. For every 10 users who sign up with us, 1-2 will not verify their address for whatever reason and therefore are not valid users.

As such, the above graph is not useful for site to site comparisons, but is useful to see site specific trends. Dakka had a big spam problem in mid 2009, and while spam posts were not too bad, we had a lot of problems with spam registrations. As we cut down on it the registration rate dropped but more normal users were signing up so the community was actually growing faster. The most interesting things on the graph are the big spikes. The first heresy online spike is due to them requiring registration to read forum threads after the first thread has been read, as well as having a very simple (no verification) signup process at the time. It was very interesting to see the data come in for that, especially the relative dip afterwards as the initial readership had all signed up. Librarium online experiment with strange registration options and requirements quite frequently as well, and that is represented in their very volatile graph line. They also have by far the best search engine referrals which means a lot more casual users find their site but dont stick around long for whatever reason.

One of the other big benchmarks we hit recently was this:

Dakka became the biggest wargaming gallery on this planet. Dont let the graph confuse you, it is still pretty much neck and neck, but we are getting loads of wargaming images at a faster rate than coolmini. The absolute number of images is the only thing we can compare as coolmini and dakka could not be more different. They are a great site with a fantastic gallery and a much higher grade of painting community than our more general community (not to say we dont have some great painters too), but most importantly they are doing their part for the community very well, and that is why we are hosting one of their banners on our home page at the moment fwiw. Our gallery is about getting as many wargaming images as possible so you can see something as a WIP, a completed model, on the tabletop, etc. whereas theirs is just showing the best things people have done so we both fill different niches and are complementary rather than competitive. Still I'm pleased we are so large now and the site has not fallen over and died yet!

Finally with a confidential axis hidden, here is our traffic graph since well before Yak and I took over:


We dont want to share absolute figures with the world, but you can see how we are doing month on month and this month so far is the best ever, with traffic continuing to grow. This is unique visitors per day average per month which is the only vaguely reliable stat you can use for traffic (as opposed to hits, page views, visits, etc) which are all flawed in various ways. As you can see, everyone is doing their part well and things grow nicely. The recent dip was due to a slowing server due to server load (since then it has been upgraded) and a lack of anything new in 40k for a while which caused a bit of an impact until Dark Eldar came out.

An interesting thing to do is to compare our traffic graph above to alexa, google trends or compete.com so you can see just how inaccurate those services are (actually google trends is ok if you feed it data but we do not).

Anyway that is all for now. I'll do some more specific site vs site breakdowns in this thread in the future if people are interested but for now I'm all typed out. I'm not proofreading this either so hope there are no mistakes Thanks for enjoying Dakka so far!

Really interesting it's always nice to see what goes on behind the scenes of the internet.You should do this kind of thing more often.

nice one

'claw

Really good work. Could this be some sort of bi-anual Dakka report that allows us to see how we're doing?

the site traffic one is really interesting, its interesting how much warseer has deopped in the last in the last few months, I wonde why that is

Cool... not sure what to say other than that.

"Good Job!"

Also to quote an idiot that my dad once worked for.

"How am I supposed to run a company useing all these graphs!?!"

Could this set a precedent for an Annual "State of the Forum" announcement?

It's cuz 'o me. Crowd always follows me

Excellent info Legoburner, very interesting read and fair play to dakka

Yes, agreed with everyone. a "State of the DakkaDakka address" is needed at least annually.

I blame the ''you find them attractive...but why?'' thread.

Good work Legoburner, intriguing stuff.

Looking forward to crushing Warseer in 2011 (evil laugh)

So many colors

But, alas alot of the post on Dakka is dribble...kinda like my reply!

like its better elsewhere.

Tigerone wrote:But, alas alot of the post on Dakka is dribble...kinda like my reply!

If you like dribble, and especially drool, check out the Off-Topic Forum!

Triple your post count in one day!

Since I know most people are too lazy to search for it, here is a link:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/forums/show/54.page

WHOO DAKKA DAKKA!

Lego's posts of random stats and graphs are always cool and interesting.

I always said that the way you guys do things on Dakka are the way that they ought to be done.

The popularity of this site comes as no surprise to me, as I've made the rounds of most of the fansites and this is by far the greatest, in my opinion. I always wondered what happened to Tau Online. I rather enjoyed that forum until it just went completely into the toilet.

We are Dakka.

I find the community here much more welcoming and less restrictive. For example, I find the mods over at Warseer, especially in the News & rumors section... I'll be polite and say 'overly zelous' in the pursuit of their mod duties. The mods here tend to leave things alone unless things get really out of hand, and I apprecaite that.

The Dakka Gallery really is a standout feature of the site. The ease of posting images, and the fact that it circumvents many work filters makes it easier to give feedback

So the Data supports my claim that Dakka is da best and those other gits be squishy liek dem fish eads lol

Great to see such growth in recent years

Jon Touchdown wrote:So the Data supports my claim that Dakka is da best and those other gits be squishy then dem fish eads lol

Dem ovva websites is for weedy gits!

Now, as long as the mods here on dakka don't turn into the monomaniacal egotistical tightasses that have popped up on the other forums over the years... dakka is good to go!

chaos0xomega wrote:Now, as long as the mods here on dakka don't turn into the monomaniacal egotistical tightasses that have popped up on the other forums over the years... dakka is good to go!

Hey now buddy. We aren't supposed to speak ill of other websites, and I don't appreciate you casting aspersions on ... like that.

Monster Rain wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:Now, as long as the mods here on dakka don't turn into the monomaniacal egotistical tightasses that have popped up on the other forums over the years... dakka is good to go!

Hey now buddy. We aren't supposed to speak ill of other websites, and I don't appreciate you casting aspersions on ... like that.

Is aspersions an instrument?

Imperial Dakka will never die!

Just a minor rebuttal to certain potential parties re: these stats:

Many other sites and I'll mention them openly - Warseer/BoLs, are still great sites and we often get some great rumours/legitimate info from them, so lets not turn it into an us vs them thing, we all wargame, we all love the hobby, we all spend our £/$/€ on the games.

Its great kudos for dakka especially imho the image stats but less hate more tree hugging

Agreed, I am a big fan and regular reader of a number of the sites listed that we track. We are a bunch of sites with a common community, not a bunch of rivals. Just because dakka is the top of a pile by a number of metrics, does not mean we are the best - quality is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Agreed x2, the last thing that a hobby/interest needs is a divided community that sticks to their guns no matter what, each sub community has its strenghts/weaknesses.

Cross community interaction/debate/sharing can only steneghten the hobby/ said websites.

I'm not saying the members of other sites are bad, quite the contrary, I have been a memeber of 40konline, librarium online and warseer over the years, as well as heresy-online, tau-online, WIP, and bolter and chainsword.... all what I am saying is that the proprieters of some of those sites are responsible for destroying the communities that they created, and I don't want to see dakka suffer the same fate.

chaos0xomega wrote:Now, as long as the mods here on dakka don't turn into the monomaniacal egotistical tightasses that have popped up on the other forums over the years... dakka is good to go!

True, but I would enjoy seeing a few of the mods here putting in more of an effort when it comes to policing forum rules, and the worst mods (possibly mod) need(s) to start setting an example and follow all of the rules personally.

Aside from that, good to see DakkaDakka prospering. I've always found it to be the best wargaming site online, and I still agree with that.