Hey, it's the end of the year again, and let's face it, as a community, we didn't do squat in 2005. Here's some numbers anyway:
Our directory sizes, compared to last year, plus Love and War, minus White Noise, sorted by current size:
Directory | Last year (MB) | This year (MB) | Growth (%) |
---|---|---|---|
/ (total) | 781.32 | 1,466.92 | 87.7 |
/files/ | 409.05 | 757.38 | 85.2 |
/wrongplot/ | 264.26 | 486.45 | 84.1 |
/antwars/ | 54.13 | 87.18 | 61.1 |
/avatar/ | 16.22 | 47.75 | 194.4 |
/law/ | — | 34.80 | — |
/af/ | 15.01 | 16.44 | 9.5 |
/altreality/ | 10.77 | 14.73 | 36.8 |
/forums/ | 2.98 | 2.65 | -11.1 |
/lemmer/ | 0.01 | 0.48 | 4,700.0 |
So the whole mess is 1.43 GB right now (plus, there's a subdomain at http://plundercats.antiochforever.com/, but fuck it), having nearly doubled in the last year. Our storage quota has quintupled in as much time, though (up to 5,000 MB), so we'll probably be fine for a while. For no reason at all, here's an SVG pie graph of our disk use:
(The latest versions of Firefox and Opera and the latest nightly builds of Camino and Safari can view SVGs with varying levels of support.)
Every area of the site increased in size (even the long gone Alternate Reality site, since I added the mission 3 beta), except for the forum, which shrank. I moved a bunch of its crap into the general files area to simplify my backup routine and its users and posts and such are stored in the database, so it'll probably be sitting at 2.65 MB for a while.
The files area has 158 directories and 3,286 files (plus a ton of little metadata files for many of those).
The wiki has grown from 391 to 477 pages. A lot of those new pages are redirects, but you know, the quality has gone up, I think...
It also has a perhaps excessive eight different themes (my favorite is Blue, for its blueness). I started spamming 32-bit PNGs everywhere (usually with opaque black backgrounds for IE), probably most obvious on phal's new old Forever design.
We had an estimated 39,172 unique visitors this year. A quick look at our monthly bandwidth use (minus the few days left in December), again compared to last year:
Hits | Bytes transferred (GB) | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
Month | Last year | This year | Last year | This year |
January | 186,225 | 300,455 | 1.49 | 3.54 |
February | 750,426 | 525,750 | 4.69 | 7.57 |
March | 666,389 | 737,716 | 4.56 | 11.47 |
April | 1,152,426 | 573,245 | 14.90 | 9.70 |
May | 869,519 | 380,939 | 6.33 | 10.39 |
June | 928,600 | 347,806 | 6.25 | 8.18 |
July | 809,222 | 408,119 | 6.05 | 11.04 |
August | 771,332 | 356,192 | 5.63 | 11.34 |
September | 848,508 | 331,803 | 7.16 | 8.92 |
October | 908,500 | 323,842 | 9.35 | 8.02 |
November | 606,100 | 328,607 | 6.05 | 7.81 |
December | 477,017 | 519,381 | 5.45 | 9.69 |
total | 8,974,264 | 5,133,855 | 77.90 | 107.66 |
Note that the January 2004 stats were incomplete, and the January 2005 stats are missing three days from right in the middle, so, uh, these numbers kind of suck. Anyway, for whatever reasons, we generally had fewer hits but greater bandwidth use. The average monthly bandwidth use from both years (minus January) is about 8 GB, so I made another pointless graph that shows each month of this year compared to the average (obviously, I didn't get anything cool for Christmas):
Here's bandwidth use by file extension in another thoroughly gratuitous display of data. The left table is sorted by number of hits, and the right table is sorted by bandwidth use, but it's the same data:
File extension | Hits | Hits (%) |
---|---|---|
.gif | 1,483,380 | 28.8 |
.jpg | 1,477,319 | 28.7 |
.png | 1,318,328 | 25.6 |
.php | 405,457 | 7.8 |
.html | 178,049 | 3.4 |
.css | 146,028 | 2.8 |
.pl | 61,318 | 1.1 |
.js | 34,486 | 0.6 |
.zip | 11,312 | 0.2 |
File extension | Bandwidth (GB) | Bandwidth (%) |
---|---|---|
.zip | 45.07 | 41.8 |
.png | 19.25 | 17.8 |
.jpg | 15.87 | 14.7 |
.gif | 13.15 | 12.2 |
.php | 4.49 | 4.1 |
.html | 1.11 | 1.0 |
.css | 0.28 | 0.2 |
.pl | 0.62 | 0.5 |
.js | 0.04 | 0.0 |
Zip archives were the third highest bandwidth users last year, but now they're number one (covering over twice as many gigs as the next biggest, PNGs). Zips are at the opposite end of the table when it comes to hits, though (obviously because they tend to be so much bigger).
The forum's RSS feed got 9,149 hits this year compared to 1,603 last year, so I guess some people actually use RSS these days.
The forum is still the most popular part of the site (followed by the wiki with half the hits of that, followed by The Wrong Plot with half the hits of that), Windows is still the most popular operating system by a completely ridiculous amount (followed by Mac OS X, with Linux pulling in fewer hits than the search bots), Windows XP is still the most popular version of Windows by a ridiculous amount (followed by 2000 and 98 by very small amounts, albeit still bigger than OS X and Linux). However, Mac OS and Linux still reign triumphant over Windows 95. Interestingly:
Browser | Last year (%) | This year (%) | How much I hate this browser |
---|---|---|---|
Mozilla (and variants) | 37.7 | 47.1 | not at all |
Internet Explorer | 55.5 | 46.6 | THIS MUCH |
Opera | 2.3 | 2.9 | not at all |
Safari/Konqueror | 2.4 | 2.4 | not at all |
Mozilla beat out Internet Explorer, finally, goddammit (as Firefox 1.0 debuted late last year and Firefox 1.5 debuted late this year). Safari stayed the same, and hey, the newly ad-free Opera gained a small edge over it.
Yahoo (with their stupidly named bot, Inktomi Slurp) and MSN (with MSNBot), in that order, hit us the most with search bots, but Google and Google Images still bring in way more visitors than either of them, because, honestly, who the hell searches with Yahoo anymore or MSN ever? "Antioch Chronicles," "Antioch Forever," "The Wrong Plot," and, uh, "DC Porn Hub" all beat last year's champion, "how about a nice cup of STFU," as the most frequent search terms people find us with.
The forum (plus White Noise, minus White Noise) had 10 new registrees (although a few of them, like Spooky, were oldbies) to last year's 19. Predictably, Solaris still rules the roost for themes, although none of them changed much (if at all):
Theme | Last year (users) | This year (users) |
---|---|---|
Solaris | 122 | 131 |
Digital Twilight | 9 | 11 |
subSilver | 5 | 4 |
Space Pilot 3K | 4 | 4 |
We had:
Most of our referrals come from search engines or involve the Wrong Plot somehow, but as far as Antioch-related stuff goes, this Wikipedia page and its variants seem to draw a lot of people over. Maybe that's why zips are so much more popular this year?
Here's a very rough look at our traffic breakdown, looking at hits from this year and last:
Part of the site | Last year | This year |
---|---|---|
forum | 821,805 | 309,848 |
wiki | 58,833 | 60,820 |
So to draw some conclusions, it looks like the forum's withering a bit by any measure, despite our disk and bandwidth use going up. I'll take the safe guess that most of the additional bandwidth is going to The Antioch Chronicles, the user files, and our hosted sites.
And to conclude, here's a look at how long we've been at each place. Sorted chronologically:
Place | Duration (days) |
---|---|
Original Forum | 304 |
CoolBoards | 151 |
EZBoard | 612 |
Ashenvale | 212 |
Antioch Forever | 973 |
Since I don't want to make another SVG, let's stretch Auspex's mug to illustrate the proportions (because that's the Antioch Forever difference, see):
Antioch Forever (973 days)
EZBoard (612)
Original Forum (304)
Ashenvale (212)
CoolBoards (151)
An alternate view, dividing the community into two epochs along the cancellation of Antioch 3:
Without Antioch (1,507 days)
With Antioch (751)
That, friends, is a long ass time.
—typhoon, 27 December 2005
Edited Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 10:55 PM by typhoon.