a graph of your traffic

[iondrive]

I'm just curious to see how much traffic you get or have gotten. Is there any way you can post a graph of forum usage during the past months or years or so? I would just like to see that as an indicator of how s3d and your website have progressed over the years. Take it as an opportunity to brag about how well things are going compared to previous years.

nvidia's 3d-vision forum has 23 pages and that's alot more that it was a year or two ago but they're all lumped into one s3d forum there.

Oh yeah, I seem to recall you mentioning something about usage doubling or something like that. Still, I would like to see a graph. Maybe even a weekly one.

just curious,

--- iondrive ---

[cybereality]

I don't have a graph but I do live here every day and read every post. Overall over the past 2 years or so it seems like the general activity on the site is about the same (or in some regards even less lively than before). In terms of traffic I imagine it has gone up. In the beginning there were a small number of members but they seemed to make more posts and threads seemed to have more action at times. Now it seems there are a lot more newcomers asking basic questions and just a smaller number of active "regulars". I guess that could be taken a few different ways. However the amount of buzz and news/blog postings on 3D is up by a huge margin. I used to run a small 3d/vr tech blog and I would have to scrape just to make a single post daily. Now you can see all the big sites (engadget/gizmodo, etc.) have numerous 3D articles every day. If you read the comments on those articles they went from being totally against 3D to now somewhat accepting of it. So there is a huge shift if you were to look at all internet traffic relating to 3D. I am not so sure traffic on this site would be as interesting.

[Neil]

Hi Guys!

I don't think it would be appropriate to share all our stats. However:



Unique Visitors refers to individual IP addresses, not individual visits (e.g. if you visit 5 times, you're only considered a unique visitor once). We use the latest version of AWSTATS.

This is just for a single month, comparing years 2008, 2009, and 2010. The patterns are also very consistent, and MTBS is habitual for many people (which is very flattering). When you consider that Google and search engines couldn't even see us until recently, it's really quite amazing. Also, our Google Pagerank recently climbed from 4 to 5 (each step is a logarithmic improvement). Not quite a traffic indicator, but it does reflect website importance in the eyes of Google indexing.

If the forums seem quiet, they are deceivingly so. How many times have you read "long term lurker, first time poster"? It's always a small portion of readers who post. Many subscribe so they can track topics, read threads, etc.

We are going to be implementing some new features shortly which are designed for community involvement. I can't convey how much time and effort was invested by several people to make this possible, so I hope you all take advantage of it!

Regards,
Neil

[iondrive]

Thanks guys,

That satisfies my curiosity very well except that sometimes I think there's a lull in activity and wonder if it's true or just an odd illusion since it's hard to tell sometimes. I forgot to mention in the top post that I don't blame you if you decide to keep such info private but I'm very glad to see the yearly improvement. Maybe I'll remind you to update it next year.

The only other thing I was wondering about was if there was a spike in use here when there's a new version of a driver, be it TriDef or iZ3D or other. Do you have any sense of that phenomenon? Or what other events in the world cause a spike in visits here?

--- iondrive ---

[Neil]

We are always looking for ways to attract member participation. Do you have some ideas?

Regards,
Neil

[iondrive]

ideas?

Hmmm, well there's always a contest idea you can come up with but I think you've done some of that and it seems to be a little hard to get people psyched. How about paying people like me to make game profiles?

I think you can keep chugging along the way you have been and I expect traffic to increase yearly the way it has been.

I guess you could setup a virtual world like Second Life or else just VR chat. Does anyone remember Blaxxun's VR chat? That was kind of fun. Hmmm, I think that's actually a good idea.

[cybereality]

I think a new version of NAW that was fully 3D and stereoscopic would be really cool and could attract members. If I ever have some free time maybe I will make a demo and see what people think.

[iondrive]

I still haven't tried NAW. I'll get to it eventually. Maybe in a year or so.

I tried to get Blaxxun's VR chat running but it looks like it's a completely dead thing. Oh well. Anyway, for me, a VR chat function would be a distraction from my reading and posting that I like to do here. Still, I think I would like it and try it just to say hi to whomever was around. Maybe you could resurrect a Blaxxun server but it's probably full of security holes by now. I don't really know anything about any other VR chat server software and how much it would cost. Maybe there's a free open source VR chat server but at best it might work in interlaced mode as far as s3d is concerned. I could be wrong of course but I would expect an open source thing like that to be OpenGL. Also it would be best if it would be integrated into the forum posting but that would be unlikely and awkward. Sometimes simpler is better and more efficient.

Another idea: an eBay-like function
I don't really like this idea for various reasons but it might be nice for some people to find special hard-to-find 3d equipment. I would like it to be more like old newspaper for-sale ads including want-to-buy ads instead of time-based auctions. It's nice and simple that way. I know doing something like this introduces alot of new problems to deal with.

Another idea: "something of the day"
I know iZ3D has some kind of 3d wallpaper thing. You could have 3d-wallpaper-of-the-day or just pick 365 of your favorite 3d screenshots and have 3d-screenshots-of-the-day. If you could get 3d screenshots of very new games and demos, that might encourage people to visit more often if they come to expect that of you. Well, big new games don't come out that often so maybe it should be -of-the-week/month instead for new games. I don't think you want to do babe-of-the-day like some game site does.

hire a comic artist whose every joke is hilarious for a daily/weekly comic post:
That would be nice but not really enough to increase traffic.

What's the status of s3d-in-a-browser window? It would be nice if it was easier to see the 3d screenshots here if that were possible. In my case, I would have to use interlaced.

Is there a browser plug-in that converts side-by-side to interlaced?

s3d video of the week would be nice. It could be gameplay or other. I saw yurithebest on youtube in s3d recently.

EDIT: just got back from your favorite s3d videos forum. That's good but too bad it takes you away from this website.