These days, traffic on the MBH forum homepage averaged betwee 1400 and 2000 views a day. By far the single biggest one-day surge of views came on Dec. 22, 2010, when the homepage got 6,492 views.
Does anybody have any idea what caused that? Can you suss out a thread from that period that might have caused all the stir? Was that the day that Buddha died, for example?
Edited to add: no, Buddha passed on December 16, 2010.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jan 28, 2017 7:14 AM
Do you have Google analytics installed at the back end, or any other traffic tracking program? That should give you the answer. If not ask your hosts for traffic data for that day.
I think you could search using the date as your filter and that should get a list of hits for every thread that got posted on on that day, since it lists the date under the username in each post. (Presumably each thread would get lots of hits on a busy day like that.)
Once you had a list of threads from that day you could close the duplicates and compare the threads and see if anything in particular stood out. It seems like it's close enough to when Buddha passed that that might be part of it. Probably past the worst of the TB vs. Pucker debates. There was a lot going on at that point with debate about updating the forum rules, so maybe a thread or two on that? Memorial threads were probably still going strong.
It would be interesting to check some other dates too, like compare the first post date in each sub-forum to the analytics to see how they impacted traffic. My general feeling (not backed by data, just sort of watching the forum) is that some of the sub forums took posts away from the main page, and that posts tend to create posts in a snowballing fashion. The only real traffic statistics I have is the number of spam posts we get each day, which I dutifully write down each day for my ritualistic battle with support about turning off the spam filter.
I also eventually started helping the FB page approve members. We still have a lot more members here, but they get a lot more new member requests than we do. I don't know if that's because we have reached saturation here or if it's because FB is so good at pushing views.
Just visually looking you can (currently) go back to page 788 to threads with the last post date is Dec 21, 2010 and then page previous a few pages and look at high post counts. However, nothing really stood out at first glance to me and I paged previous until March, 2011. Perhaps some changes to the homepage were being made that day and various webcrawlers hit it multiple times. Maybe another location on the internet shared a link for the forum and lots of clicks came that way. Maybe there was a huge thread that's since been removed.
Ryan! It's been a while. You were here back then, and you disappeared for a long time. Glad you're here. (I'm sure you've been back for a while, too, but I dip in and out and somehow I've missed you.)
I stumbled across Mooncat's very first post, which was a really nice and complex memory of, and encomium to, Buddha:
Hey Adam! I'm still here though I post infrequently I read quite often and keep up with your latest YouTube uploads. I actually really enjoyed your latest "How did people learn blues harmonica before the internet?" even though 'no one asked for it', ha.
As for Facebook, the Modern Blue Harmonica group was created by Isaac July 31, 2009. I see a bunch of us joined the group in March, 2013. I also seen he made a reminder post about the group in April, 2014.
I thought that might be Mooncat's first post too before I recalled that people had other accounts and even were able to post anonymously at one point. So that was his first post under the Mooncat account. Previously he had the profile name Violin Cat found his 4th post from that account here.
Looking at my old posts makes me cringe, haha.
FWIW, Skype was down for maintenance on Wed Dec 22, 2010 but doubt that's related. I glanced at harp-l archives for that date and didn't see MBH mentioned in particular.
