AlanHo Posted May 2, 2011 Report Share Posted May 2, 2011 I am a member of a technical forum for my car brand which celebrates its third birthday today. It currently has 2063 members worldwide who have made 102,543 posts in 3 years - an average of 94 posts per day overall. Currently the post rate is averaging 120 per day. About a third of the posts are technical - the remainder being unrelated topics or humour.The administrators have just published some statistics that they have somehow harvested from the posts stored on the server - as follows :-Browser used to access the forumMS IE 53.9%Firefox 27.1%Chrome 9.8%Safari 5.7%Opera 1.9%Operating System used by postersWindows 7 37.3%Windows Vista 24.3%Windows XP 28.5%Linux 1.6%Mac 6.2%Search Engines used to find the forumGoogle 96.1%MS Bing 1.4%Yahoo 1.2%Windows Live 0.3%Is it really possible to accurately harvest such information off a Forum's server - if so - what more can be harvested? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Craig Posted May 2, 2011 Report Share Posted May 2, 2011 Afternoon,It isn't possible to get these statistics from the forum software, however it is possible to access this information from the server the forum is hosted on. Windows Forum is hosted on a Linux based server, and I have access to a control panel which allows me to administer the domain and carry out domain related tasks. The control panel software is called 'cPanel'. Google that and you will find it is one of two or three products that are widely used within the Linux environment to manage domain related tasks (cPanel is my personal preference as it's easy to use and very powerful).Within cPanel, one of the many features is AWStats. If you view their website, you will see what statistics are available. This feature was especially helpful for me last week when I was trying to determine who/what was causing the high bandwidth utilisation.Hopefully that has answered the question.I have also attached a PDF with some statistics for Windows Forum from April.Windows.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlanHo Posted May 2, 2011 Author Report Share Posted May 2, 2011 Afternoon,It isn't possible to get these statistics from the forum software, however it is possible to access this information from the server the forum is hosted on. Windows Forum is hosted on a Linux based server, and I have access to a control panel which allows me to administer the domain and carry out domain related tasks. The control panel software is called 'cPanel'. Google that and you will find it is one of two or three products that are widely used within the Linux environment to manage domain related tasks (cPanel is my personal preference as it's easy to use and very powerful).Within cPanel, one of the many features is AWStats. If you view their website, you will see what statistics are available. This feature was especially helpful for me last week when I was trying to determine who/what was causing the high bandwidth utilisation.Hopefully that has answered the question.I have also attached a PDF with some statistics for Windows Forum from April.Thanks Craig - that was enlightening. So it is true that you can harvest user data from the server - which means that when I log on to the forum, information is gleaned from my computer.I always log on to the forum as soon as I get out of bed and sit in my Study "in the buff" whilst I do my posts and browse. I have a web cam which is always on - cripes.................... :vibrate:................ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted May 2, 2011 Report Share Posted May 2, 2011 I always log on to the forum as soon as I get out of bed and sit in my Study "in the buff" whilst I do my posts and browse. I have a web cam which is always on - cripes.................... :vibrate:................Now that is scary Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CurlyWhirly Posted May 2, 2011 Report Share Posted May 2, 2011 Afternoon,It isn't possible to get these statistics from the forum software, however it is possible to access this information from the server the forum is hosted on. Windows Forum is hosted on a Linux based server, and I have access to a control panel which allows me to administer the domain and carry out domain related tasks. The control panel software is called 'cPanel'. Google that and you will find it is one of two or three products that are widely used within the Linux environment to manage domain related tasks (cPanel is my personal preference as it's easy to use and very powerful).Within cPanel, one of the many features is AWStats. If you view their website, you will see what statistics are available. This feature was especially helpful for me last week when I was trying to determine who/what was causing the high bandwidth utilisation.Hopefully that has answered the question.I have also attached a PDF with some statistics for Windows Forum from April.Looking at those stats I can see that there is a much smaller difference between the number of users of Internet Explorer and Firefox compared to the stats in Alan Ho's post !Google is still dominant in both sets of stats though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D4\/!d Posted May 2, 2011 Report Share Posted May 2, 2011 scary cripes.................... :vibrate:................ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Posted May 13, 2011 Report Share Posted May 13, 2011 Thanks Craig - that was enlightening. So it is true that you can harvest user data from the server - which means that when I log on to the forum, information is gleaned from my computer.I always log on to the forum as soon as I get out of bed and sit in my Study "in the buff" whilst I do my posts and browse. I have a web cam which is always on - cripes.................... :vibrate:................Not from your computer, but from your browser. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Irene Posted May 14, 2011 Report Share Posted May 14, 2011 Thanks Craig - that was enlightening. So it is true that you can harvest user data from the server - which means that when I log on to the forum, information is gleaned from my computer.I always log on to the forum as soon as I get out of bed and sit in my Study "in the buff" whilst I do my posts and browse. I have a web cam which is always on - cripes.................... :vibrate:................Not from your computer, but from your browser.Where have you been Chris? Not heard from you for ages! :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlanHo Posted May 15, 2011 Author Report Share Posted May 15, 2011 The forum has been a frantic hive of activity over the last 24 hours.Each day I open the forum to the "Today's active content page" at the top of which it tells you the number of posts in the last 24 hours. You can also use the drop down box at the bottom of the page to select the number of posts over the past week. or month...etc.We have had 11 posts in the last 24 hours compared with an average of 7 per day over the last week and 6 per day over the past month.Not bad for a forum with only 15,502 members is it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlanHo Posted May 22, 2011 Author Report Share Posted May 22, 2011 The forum has been a frantic hive of activity over the last 24 hours.Each day I open the forum to the "Today's active content page" at the top of which it tells you the number of posts in the last 24 hours. You can also use the drop down box at the bottom of the page to select the number of posts over the past week. or month...etc.We have had 11 posts in the last 24 hours compared with an average of 7 per day over the last week and 6 per day over the past month.Not bad for a forum with only 15,502 members is it?We have reached a new low - zero posts in the last 24 hours. - This post will make sure we get at least one post in the next 24 hours Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CurlyWhirly Posted May 22, 2011 Report Share Posted May 22, 2011 We have reached a new low - zero posts in the last 24 hours. Crikey :0 Where is every one ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted May 22, 2011 Report Share Posted May 22, 2011 We have been to successful and everyone's computers are running without problems (apart from the few that are running Vista) so nothing to sort out Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CurlyWhirly Posted May 23, 2011 Report Share Posted May 23, 2011 We have been to successful and everyone's computers are running without problems (apart from the few that are running Vista) so nothing to sort outMost posts on WF are non-PC also I've been running vista for over 3 years with no problems :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rong Posted May 23, 2011 Report Share Posted May 23, 2011 We have been to successful and everyone's computers are running without problems (apart from the few that are running Vista) so nothing to sort outMost posts on WF are non-PC also I've been running vista for over 3 years with no problems :PProbably because you haven't caught it yet ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CurlyWhirly Posted May 26, 2011 Report Share Posted May 26, 2011 We have been to successful and everyone's computers are running without problems (apart from the few that are running Vista) so nothing to sort outMost posts on WF are non-PC also I've been running vista for over 3 years with no problems :PProbably because you haven't caught it yet ;)If I was going to get the Vista bug, I would have got it by now ! :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.