Back in 2007 thru 2012, we had many days when the number of viewers online was 3000 to 4000 a minute. When the televised news media began promoting Facebook circa 2013, we saw our traffic fall but over the past few months it has rebounded. Several other forum webmasters have also noted a rise in traffic in recent months. Today we had over 7000 viewers online (Sunday, January 15th 2023). There is evidence pointing to a migration away from big tech platforms as people have become aware of privacy issues. Below is a screen shot of "Who's Online", which can be seen at the bottom of our main index page... https://www.yachtforums.com/superyacht/ ***
Yup, the Usual Suspects are visible but I had no idea there was another 7,000 also surfing Yacht Forums. Welcome Aboard.
Never ending thrills here. I'm on,, HA!! Don't take this as a poor mark. People have to do their personals (including sleep) from time to time. Oh, it's payday for some, their out spending (bill paying) somewhere else. They'll be back.. As always. And even our friend; Jorge Lang had visited. Looking forward to his next project.
How is the “who’s online” calculated? I guess once you access the site but is there a time out after which a user drops off? For instance if you switch to a different tab in your browser, are you still considered “on line”? Wondering how the mechanics of it works
It's calculated hourly. One of the driving factors behind the increase in traffic is from indexing. A few years ago I closed about 100 forums to public viewing. You had to be registered and logged in to see content in these forums. This helped to drive the quality of our membership while giving our site supporters more exclusivity. Although humans couldn't see content in closed forums, bots could still read our discussions and articles. Somewhere over the past couple of years the algorithms (or indexing parameters) changed and the content of those closed forums wasn't being indexed. Our traffic had been waning. In the 3rd quarter of 2022 I opened up ALL the forums and soon after we started to see all the major search engines crawl the site. In the last quarter of 2022, traffic jumped as 1000's of URLs were being indexed. January is the strongest month we've seen in years. I've spoken with several other guys running large forums and they saw a big jump in traffic in 2022. I've also had inquiries from 3 different forum aggregators who want to acquire more forums. As Internet 2.0 evolves, they believe communities (or colonies) will make up the digital landscape.
