Attention TP Administrators!

[hdaugus]

How’s it going?  I'm a member here and I was wondering if you have some time to answer a question about message board behavior for a grad school project I've got going now?

As part of the thesis for my graduate degree I’ve created (with some teammates) a website called GenerationWorkplace.com which is a forum for the discussion of generational issues in the workplace.  We’re starting to do some analysis about site behavior and I’m looking for some benchmarks and/or other sites to compare it to.

The main question I have for you is about guests or “lurkers” compared to registered users on the site.  Do you have any idea of the ratio of guests to registered users for the TinyPortal forum?  Although we have a pretty good number of people who have become registered users, my team members are concerned that we have all these guests who aren’t signing on to the site.  My guess is this is a fairly common phenomenon for a message board to have a lot of lurkers and I’m trying to gather some data to support this guess.

Anyway if you have a chance to share some numbers I’d really appreciate it.  You can PM me if you want or respond here.

Thanks so much!

Heather

PS. Our site uses TP.

[G6Cad]

Cant say for sure as there are a lot of searchengines that show up as guests even if it really is robots.

A math calculaton would probably be needed to answer your question.

lets say that 50% of the traffic every day is robots, and 20% registerd members, that leave us with about 30% guests that just look around.

[Crip]

Good math G6..
..i always failed in math at school .. F+++++++

[hdaugus]

Thanks G6 - Very good point about the bots.  These numbers help.  Thank you,
Heather

[texasflats]

If your using SMF there is a handy mod that will display bots and spiders at: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=143

I'm not sure just how accurate it is but I'm sure you can ask in the mods topic at: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=38003.0

My personal experience on a relatively young SMF/TP site with just over 1000 members is lurkers are about 50% bots around 60% of the time. I have peak moment in the mornings and evenings when that percentage is considerably less, but only from a few hours a day.

You can block most of them in your robots.txt file if theres a concern.

[Hairy]

Cant say for sure as there are a lot of searchengines that show up as guests even if it really is robots.

A math calculaton would probably be needed to answer your question.

lets say that 50% of the traffic every day is robots, and 20% registerd members, that leave us with about 30% guests that just look around.

Although my forum is much much much smaller, these percentages are pretty much the same for us.

[IchBin]

This is not the support forum, this is for feedback. If you don't have any feedback for TP please post in the appropriate board. Thanks.

[bloc]

Well, for this site probably most of the traffic are from guest, what part is robots or not I am not sure - but since there are sections/downloads here that require membership, thereare aprts not sowing up on search lists.

Many lurkers though, but since most are themselves forum starters/owners/admins so they might register faster here, to at least gain access to the TP script. On other sites it might be nothing to gain from registering => less members.