Home Barista Forum Metrics - user activity over the years? Future of forums? - Page 3

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IamOiman
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#21: Post by IamOiman »

That actually looks pretty healthy in terms of numbers. I wonder if there is some mental filtering of posts by regular users that cloud how many posts and activity they believe occur compared to what actually is posted on HB. We'll see if there is a post-covid downtick for 2021 but this site is not going anywhere soon.

I think the most surprising statistic to me is the number of guests that browse the site. I would think the restricted features would encourage them to at least make an account and lurk without posting rather than remain as a guest.
-Ryan
Using a spice grinder violates the Geneva Convention
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HB
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#22: Post by HB »

Auctor wrote:...below are some thoughts I've been playing with to improve the site (obviously just my appropriately valued two cents) ...There are a bunch of other things like modernizing site UI, etc. that could be helpful as well. In a nutshell, I think there's a ton of opportunity to take what HB already does well and leverage it to both improve the site and enhance the discourse in the coffee community.
tennisman03110 wrote:While good ideas, who will do all this?
This site is based on phpBB, thus the look, modern or otherwise, is tied to it. I'm a programmer by trade, so I've made thousands of modifications of the base code in my "free" time. The result, I believe, is a better version of phpBB. As an added bonus, I've implemented many performance, search, and mobile-friendly mods. For the majority of accesses, IMHO, it's wicked fast and looks great on mobile phones.

Someday, I would love to really revamp the site. But I'm a one-man development team, so there's limits to what I can do. I mentioned this to my career advisor and he suggested hiring it out, such as a summer intern. To really revamp the site, however, would require a significant investment in time and money (e.g., a full-time programmer and designer for 3-6 months). Someday? In the meantime, I would like to have more formal community involvement, such as the Favorite Espressos 2020. That was a lot of fun and not too much work on my part coordinating it.
Dan Kehn

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yakster
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#23: Post by yakster »

Rickpatbrown wrote:This was a thought that I had. I came on to HB at the end on 2019. The roasting sub forum was pretty active ... but I also got the sense that there were a lot of big people who had left the forum ... got a little coffee famous ... before I came on the scene.
Current roasting threads seem to tend towards interpreting Artisan graphs which has changed the conversation from the more sensory based roasting of the past. I don't have a good feel for reading these graphs, even though I've been logging my roasts in one form or another since I started with a hot air popcorn popper decades ago, so I often skip past these discussions now. I don't know if this shift has changed the regular posters in the roasting forum, it's a possibility.

I do think that Artisan has really helped the roasting community and is a great tool. I started logging with pen and paper and quickly made an Excel worksheet where I'd enter popper temps in every 30 seconds which would update a graph, moved to BehmorThing then RoasterThing with my Behmor 1600 and now just use the Bullet's RoastWorld software because I haven't felt motivated enough to switch over my Bullet to Artisan. I still rely on color changes, smells, and the sounds of first crack for a lot of my roasting decisions. I think not having a BT probe on the Behmor was a big influence in this, I did install thermocouple probes in my Behmor below the heating elements and at the exhaust that helped quite a bit but didn't translate well to anyone else's roast profiles.
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HB
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#24: Post by HB »

IamOiman wrote:That actually looks pretty healthy in terms of numbers... I think the most surprising statistic to me is the number of guests that browse the site.
Speaking of surprising statistics, I ran another query to determine how many registered users have visited in the last year: 41%. I expected a lot more "abandoned" logins. My takeaway from the statistics? Forums aren't dying off, but their growth may have been slowed by alternative online communities.
Dan Kehn

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LBIespresso
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#25: Post by LBIespresso »

HB wrote: Someday, I would love to really revamp the site...In the meantime, I would like to have more formal community involvement, such as the Favorite Espressos 2020. That was a lot of fun and not too much work on my part coordinating it.
I believe that the ROI of activities like these are higher than changing the look and feel of the site. Clearly both are important but that was really enjoyable for me and seemed to be so for many others.

I have been trying to think of a version of that with green coffee where us home roasters each get the same green and then send the roasted coffee to one site. Then ship it out from there to the community to have a big cupping. Maybe 5-10 people roast 2 or 3 pounds each and then everyone gets 5-9 blind bags to cup and we all compare notes. The issue I am struggling with is getting the logistics to a point where it's manageable. I don't think I could swing it but it could be fun.

Maybe with some green from Aida Batlle?
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HB
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#26: Post by HB »

HB wrote:I was curious about your question, so I wrote a query to calculate the number of registrations in a year, posts, and unique posters...
I've updated it for 2021:
Year    Regs    Posts   Posters
2021	6149	69503	5394
2020	3588	74070	5302
2019	2169	61697	3925
2018	2019	62037	3537
2017	1859	55023	3273
2016	1769	60283	3049
2015	1755	59200	2740
The number of posts fell from the pandemic-induced high, but the number of registrants increased significantly. Not sure what to make of that, other than it suggests a lot more lurkers.
Dan Kehn

ira
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#27: Post by ira »

I wonder if listing user counts vs posts would be interesting.

0 posts
1 post
2-20 posts
20-100 posts
100+ posts

ira

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HB
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#28: Post by HB »

The results from the last year aren't surprising: Most posters are moderately-active (2-20 posts) or one-time posters. The number of very active members (100+ posts) is small.
Posts   Users
All     5402
1       1693
2-20    3195
21-99    394
100+     120
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ira
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#29: Post by ira »

So, 64,000 people belong but didn't post for a year. and I'd guess a significant number signed up but never posted anything which seems odd to me or does signing up get rid of ads or something?

Ira

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#30: Post by HB »

I think you misread the data; there's 29K registered members in the site's history, of which ~40% visited in the last year. Or, to put it another way, of the members who logged in during the past year, slightly less than half posted at least once. Signing in doesn't really change the ad display, but it does enable features that lurkers don't see (e.g., notifications, unread posts tracking, PMs, etc).
Dan Kehn