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Warseer seems to be generating a lot of bad press recently so I had a look at their site ranking and they seem to been well and truly toppled from the top spot as both Dakka and BOLS have a ranking twice as high (40k ish compared to 100kish).

I don't know how this ranking is complied though so does this mean anything?

I doubt it.

Then again, Warseer has been getting bad press for a while (which wasn't helped by the various hackings it suffered) so it doesn't surprise me, really.

Dakka currently has twice as many users online (5793 vs 2486) so maybe its right enough.

Actually, Dakka has 744 members currently online vs Warseer's 519, so the gap isn't nearly as large as the total numbers (which include unregistered 'guests') suggest.

 Avatar 720 wrote:
Actually, Dakka has 744 members currently online vs Warseer's 519, so the gap isn't nearly as large as the total numbers (which include unregistered 'guests') suggest.

Why make the distinction between registered and unregistered members?

Because only the registered members are actually members; unregistered people are guests, and it's impossible to know how many of those are bots, lurkers, passers by etc. etc.

I'm fairly sure that the Dakka numbers include people using the Galleries as well, which right now are one of the places "hosting" pictures of the leaked Tau material.

But then surely both sites would be affected and the noise would cancel out? Besides lurkers and passers by should be counted as they are both legitmate users, its not as if you would have many people visit sites such as this by accident.
Also wouldn't each vistor need to have a distinct IP address to show up in the stats?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kanluwen wrote:
I'm fairly sure that the Dakka numbers include people using the Galleries as well, which right now are one of the places "hosting" pictures of the leaked Tau material.

Thats a good point actually.

 Palindrome wrote:
Besides lurkers and passers by should be counted as they are both legitmate users

Okay then, out of over 5000 guests point out the lurkers and passers by and we'll add them to the list of registered members.

 Avatar 720 wrote:

Okay then, out of over 5000 guests point out the lurkers and passers by and we'll add them to the list of registered members.

Impossible, but given that both sites cater to exactly the same audience I see no reason why the 2000+ traffic difference could simply be labelled as 'bots'. It is a very safe bet to assume that the population visiting boths sites will have a very similar make up and as such I see no reason why unregistered memebers should be discounted, after all registered members can also be bots, sock puppets and lurkers.. Even if we do discount non registered members for some reason Warseer certainly seems to have fallen from its past glories.

My original question was how accurate website ranking sites are though.

Any forum of significant size will have bots scanning the site, I think Dakka and Warseer would both have a similar number of them at any one time.

So while the actual number may not reflect how many real people are on, you can still get a good idea of the difference between the traffic on both sites. IE: if Dakka has twice as many guests as Warseer it is safe to say that they have around twice as many real people reading the site. and twice as many Bots of course.