This is probably the data that lends itself least to this time range. It would likely produce more interesting results over shorter time ranges like yearly or even monthly. I don’t have any immediate ideas on how to display that concisely. I’m not opposed to running the report 96 times, but I’m not sure anyone wants to see all 96 of them…
Unknown. My best guess is that there was an overall spike in Crawler activity, and the traffic was misidentified as anonymous. Here are a few snapshots of the data that highlight this:
Here are a couple of large spikes around 10 days apart, including the large one you pointed out. I have no idea why the magnitude of these is so large. I certainly don’t remember anything happening around those times. There’s not a corresponding spike in posts or topics either, so that doesn’t explain it. Ignoring magnitude for a moment, I think the general pattern is that crawlers are frequently doing small or incremental updates, with periodic large or full updates.
Here are a few more snapshots for context, although none of them are quite so dramatic:
20k+ pageviews in a single day is still high, even for that. If they were bots, then I would expect those numbers to show under logged in pageviews instead. The logged in counts during those spikes is not out of line with the other days around them, so there’s not a similar increase in traffic, which is part of why those days stand out so much on the graph. That said, I’m not familiar enough with how the games were being run to be able to definitively rule it out either. I would defer to @tinoesroho’s expertise there.
Yellow (gold?) is crawlers, red is anonymous, and blue is logged in.
No surprises here. If you’re wondering why you occasionally see errors/performance issues with the site, this is why.
It’s not obvious from the graph since the y-axis is basically broken, but there were regularly dozens of likes. It’s just that now there are thousands.
The userbase here has never been much into creating lots of new topics, instead preferring to keep to relatively few. It’s not obvious from the graph because of the how the data is exported, but there are actually many gaps in the data, since it only contains dates when new topics were created.
They were role playing games, in the play by post style (more or less.) The first game we played was set in the world of Highlander, and the second was called Space Abbey, which was a sort of futuristic space opera/Downton Abbey hybrid… and they were wonderful fun! I was always amazed at what kind of amazing stories my fellow players came up with.
They’re still up on our site, and I believe most if not all threads involved are tagged with badass (the system used) and/or the Games category. @Messana used to run them, but they haven’t been around for a while.
I can do better than that. Here are the starter posts for both games:
I’m not sure how much sense they make to non-players; I once tried to read an old game at TOS and quickly got confused, but I think that was before I started playing the games here. And for each game there were a number of DM threads, some with mechanics and some with player and character interactions that can’t be shared.
