Some Current Forum Stats, Archives

Here's the recent stats as of today:

Number of posts: 286890
Posts per day: 103.44*
Number of topics: 20966
Topics per day: 7.56*
Number of users: 6910 **
Users per day: 2.49
Number of attachments: 27665
Attachments per day: 9.97
Board started: Fri Oct 01, 2004 8:35 pm
Avatar directory size: 4.24 MiB
Database size: 895.72 MiB ***
Size of posted attachments: 8322.53 MiB ****

*These would be much higher if you took off the first 2 years where there was little activity.

**That's a little bit bloated. I purge old accounts that go unused, any account with 0 posts and no activity in 6 months gets deleted. There was a lot of spammers registered over the last six months many of whom never posted anything. They be gone by the fall and if I had to venture to guess it will settle around 6000 members by then.

***For those interested that's uncompressed data and includes everything. About half of it would be post text. The other half is mostly the search index and PM's.

****This would easily be 40 or 50 gigs by now if I didn't add that script for automatic resizing of images.

The same trend continues with increased traffic every year. For the month of April, 2012 there was a 20% increase over April, 2011.

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If you're interested you can find archives of the original here:

Sun Oct 24, 2004 3:18 pm
Grand total of 107 posts mostly from me and a few by my Brother. People dont use empty forums, matter of fact some webmasters will create multiple accounts and talk to themselves to populate them when they first launch.


Mon Oct 03, 2005 10:51 pm
A year later and now we're up too 314 posts. To put that into perspective there was days this past winter where 200 posts would have been made in one day compared to 200 for an entire year. Note that most of the posts are in "COALDELIVERY.COM Guestbook & Forum" which was website that I used to own that was driving most of the traffic to the forum. What is important about this date is it's before the real activity started. This was shortly after Katrina in August . A lot of people are starting to look for alternatives which of course lead them to coaldelivery.com and eventually the forum.


Thu Jan 26, 2006 9:47 pm
In a little less than four months the post count goes to 1500. Note the "Who's online", Smitty is forever archived as being online.


Wed Dec 13, 2006 1:33 pm
Over the summer I dumped the other forums because they weren't doing anything anyway, it became the anthracite coal forum. "COALDELIVERY.COM Guestbook & Forum" was split into a few separate ones . The post count now is up too about 4000.

From there it steadily increased, in the fall of 2007 I had outgrown the shared hosting plan and moved it to VPS plan and it's own domain. The big boost activity started in the Srping of 2008 when fuel prices were spiraling out of control. Traffic didn't die that summer, it increased and increased a lot.

Thanks for all the time you spend holding
our hands and giving us a place packed with
usefull info.

gizmo wrote:Thanks for all the time you spend holding
our hands and giving us a place packed with
usefull info.

Thanks Gizmo. Certainly my role is important in making the resources available but just about anyone could do that, it's nothing but empty space without the members.

If you have time,explain the users per day count.

tsb wrote:If you have time,explain the users per day count.

That's the average users that have registered each day since October of 2004. Keep in mind most boards have inflated numbers because they don't purge the old accounts that never get used. If I never did that the member count would be up to almost 15,000, which would triple the users per day to 7.5. 2/3 of the people that register are either spammers or never use it.

Thanks, that explains it.

I'll also note there is a couple thousand posts missing. When I had split the forums around 2007 I accidentally moved many about stokers into the new stoker forum , I had reused an unused forum that had auto prune on and they were deleted automatically like the ones in the classifieds. Before I had noticed what happened I had overwritten my backup with fresh backup. That couldn't happen now because I have multiple full backups. There is a daily backup which rotates for each day of the week, a weekly backup that rotates every 6 weeks, a monthly backup that rotates every 12 months and backup taken 6 months that is permanent. The uploaded files are also backed up in similar fashion. These are all local on my computer at home, there is also services the host provides but you never trust anyone insure your backups.

I keep meaning to put in place an incremental backup too that would be done for every hour so at a maximum I would only lose one hours worth of data but every time I look into it I somehow mange to get side tracked.