"State of the Site"...

If anyone is interested here's a glimpse of some of the stats calculated from my server logs. I've highlighted the most relevant stat which is a visit. A visit is tallied when a unique IP makes a request. You may have seen "hit counters" on some sites and it's a similar stat to that but much more accurate because there is a time limit of 30 minutes before another visit will be tallied from the same IP. In other words the same person loading multiple pages would only account for one visit unless they waited for 30 minutes between clicks. "hit counters" in most cases tally a hit each page load which of course would be a completely inaccurate measurement of actual unique traffic. Comparitively "hit counters" would be more akin to the pages stat listed here. You can just about ignore the "hit" stat listed here, that is a tabulation of every request made for each page plus the files it contains. For example for this page each image, the page file, and any other file would each count for hit. Rough estimate is about 20 hits for this page.

The huge dip in the summer of course can be attributed to it being warm. I also made some major changes starting in April which drastically reduced the visits becasue of their nature. It was one of those bite the bullet things... but it was for the future good of the site and are only beginning to really take affect now. May even be another few months before they take full affect.

Impressive growth for a coal forum!

I've even noticed that since I joined (couple weeks ago I think) the number of registered users has grown.

You provide a valuable resource here for both consumers and manufacturers. Keep up the great work and THANK YOU!

mjwood0 wrote:Impressive growth for a coal forum!

It actually caught me by surprise last year. I had this forum and another originally on my coaldelivery.com site available for years with very little activity even during this time of the year. It wasn't until shortly after Katrina that it took off like a rocket.

phpBB seems to be handling it like a champ. I've often thought of messing around with BB software, but never got around to it. Heck! My blog really only sees family and friends. Probably would be no interest whatsoever.

It's all about getting the word out from what I hear. Growth seems to grow exponentially once a site is discovered. Couple that with the rising costs of energy and you end up with a winning combination!

This is the only real coal burning forum I have seen..After finding it last year I visit almost daily during the coal burning season....it is very informative and people here really try to help others...

I have seen the growth increasing daily with new members....

Keep up the good work....we have a nice community here and hope it grows more...

AL

I've seen sites running phpbb with 1000's of posts per day. The big issue is whether the server can handle it. A site like that requires a dedicated server, currently the plan i have now has a lot of resources left. At least double what it's doing now. I've been flirting with the idea of renting a server, I have a ready made list of customers already to share it with... I'd about break even.

Trouble is Server Admin is not a hat I'm confident I can wear yet.... Well, I'm off to reading the Apache manual.

It's all about getting the word out from what I hear

That's part of it, inbound links from other sites are important but that's not even the half of it... actually not even a 1/4 of it. I won't give the farm away but just as example a standard phpbb forum ios horrendous for a search engine to try and index, the standard install has at least 5 or 6 different URL's that will all go to the same exact content. This is not good, the search engines won't index you as much nor will they place much relevance on your pages because of the duplicate content. This forum however has only one URL per unique page that Google will find. That's one of the changes I made way back in April and I still have a couple of thousand duplicate pages inGoogles Index that haven't been removed.Slowly but surely they are being removed and the duplicate content penalty for a lot of pages is going away and they'll show up in the SERP's.

FYI, phpbb is easy to install as long as you can read directions. It only requires PHP and MySQL which is common on just about any hosting plan.

http://www.phpbb.com/support/guide/#section1

Having done it many times i could have a inastallation up and running in about 5 minutes.

AL-53 wrote:This is the only real coal burning forum I have seen..

Hearth.com has a large forum but they deal mostly with wood but do have sections for coal. They did a major restructuring of there site a few months back and I suspect they killed it in the process.

BTW, there logo was made by me. Can't take credit for the design but I did create the image. Only the top part in the picture frame.

Not being really computer literate I'm not sure what all this stuff means, but I know you are on the right track!

One of the best forums on the web IMHO.

coaledsweat wrote:Not being really computer literate I'm not sure what all this stuff means,

Basically as far as the chart goes it means in the month of December so far on .avg this forum is viewed from about 583 unique visitors in a day. To be fair that is not entirely accurate because if a person views the site at three different times in a day they would account for 3 visits. It also doesn't account for bots, overall though I'd have to guess the unique visitors are probably within the 400 range per day.

Here's a complete expplanation of the graph from the author: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/webalizer_help.html

NEPAForum Admin wrote:If anyone is interested here's a glimpse of some of the stats.......

As with most things in our present day world, the effort required to make something like this work is not obvious or visible.

As a testament to your effectiveness I have found that this forum is one of a few sources for relevant and up to date help and technical support for a coal newbie, do it yourselfer like me. When I was buying and installing my first coal stove back in September more often than not a google search found words of wisdom from your forum in answer to my questions.

Thank you for the effort and intelligent planning that you put into this forum!

:thumbleft: :thumbleft: :thumbleft: :thumbleft: :thumbleft:

Yes, These forums are very nice to setup and use.!!

This is great resource for anyone thinking of or burning coal. I joined last year when we got our stove and frequent it almost everyday.

Yes, I know what it takes to run these types of forums!!

It takes a lot of hard work and time to start and keep it running, also the members support of it really helps. You have to good people and good moderators to keep things in line....

I run my own forums for my Mach 1 Mustang site that started as a little owners club a few years back and we have had to upgrade the server 3-4 times over the course of the past 4 years due to traffic and users. We are over 8000 members strong and over 700,000 messages posted.

Admin - Thought of taking donations to defer your costs if needed

WNY wrote:Admin - Thought of taking donations to defer your costs if needed

Costs are minimal right now, I've thought of doing that but I doubt you'll ever see anything like that here. I was never a fan of the donate button on any site.

Google ads however are not too far off in the distant future. They won't be viewable to logged in members though.

You all should be ashamed, only 1200 posts last month. More than Jan. , Feb. , and March combined for last year. Thanks for participating.

Hmm wonder where it will top out, not many months left in the heating season. Somebody should invent a coal fired air conditioner for the summer months....

Almost forgot, if you refer to the chart art the very top of this thread I'll give you some comparison:

Daily average of 5066 pages served to 698 visitors.


Monthly totals:
Visitors: 21,656
Pages: 157,060
Bandwidth: Just under 8.5 GB's

NEPAForum Admin wrote:You all should be ashamed, you should invent a coal fired air conditioner for the summer months....

We are working on it now boss! 8)