Over in the Bridge Hammock thread TeeDee noted the large number of views, second only to the number of views on the ring buckles thread. Both of these do have lots of views, but they also have lots of postings as well.
Being the curious sort, and liking an excuse to do a little Perl programming, I grabbed the source of the page you get selecting "Today's Posts" and had a look. It has embedded in it the titles of various threads shown, the number of "Replies" (postings-1) and the number of views. I can't seem to get more than 20 threads listed on a page at a time, and so that's all the threads I'll bother to analyze.
<unixese>
ran that through grep twice---once to get the thread titles, the other to get the lines with the replies and views. Was easier to do in 10 seconds on the command line rather than struggle out a regular expression that could get both kinds of lines in one shot. Wrote a Perl script to read both files, run pattern matches on their contents to strip off the interesting bits, created for each listed thread a string that lists the average number of views per posting, followed by the thread name, and sorted the strings in descending order.
</unixese>
Here's the result
avg
views thread name
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
38.49 Ring Buckle Supports
35.20 JRB Tarp Tent Pre-purchase List?
27.40 material questions
24.75 Ridgeline on a Claytor
24.57 What Clothes Do You Wear to Sleep in a Hammock?
23.92 Jet Boil 49.99 -10%
22.86 Frameless backpacks - do they work for hangers?
21.97 Bridge Hammock
21.66 Hammock Forums T-Shirts
20.00 Need help with a picture.
19.71 My new jungle hammock as a start
19.64 Hammock Camping with a Dog?
17.67 rated for 350lbs
17.26 hammock fans
16.02 How did those cleats work out?
15.62 parachute material
13.33 Hammock Hiking and Bears
11.71 Desert Camo HH Clone
10.62 wtb CINCH BUCKLES
10.00 convert old mummy bag into under quilt?
Of course there are lots of other variables involved, such as lifetime of the thread and so on. Still, despite the very high variation in the number of views enjoyed by a thread, there is comparatively less variation on the average #views per posting.
When I look and see how many users are active on the forum at a time, the number is generally in the range [1-20]. I can't tell how many unique viewers there are in a day (maybe the site gives the moderators more information). But my anectodal evidence, and a snapshot of average views per post are consistent with
a) a small number of 10's of distinct people viewing the site each day
b) most people viewing most new posts.
I generally read most posts. Every now and then there will be thread I don't track. For the most part I'll scan what's there.
how about the other 20.97 of you?
Grizz
Bookmarks