Alignment

[Ed]

Today has been interesting from the point of view of timing. I haven’t been on all day, but I have been here much more than normal, and what I’ve noticed is there’s rarely more than 3-4 registered members online at the same time but often within 2 mins of one person leaving another one arrives. Neither will be aware of the near-miss so both get the impression that the site is much quieter than it has been.

That set me thinking about how to improve things. Obviously, I’ve been trying to increase the number of visitors for years and trying to improve the engagement of visitors here, but I’ve had another idea.

If all registered members were to try to bias towards visiting on the hour, it could work wonders. If you are about to leave a few minutes before the hour, hang around awhile. If you visit a few times during the day, trying to make some of those visits on the hour.

If most of us tried to do that, it could help people be online at the same time, but also speed up conversations in the forums (making them more engaging), encouraging people generally to spend more time here. It might be enough to get some proper momentum going?

 

Diana likes this

[ptHarry]

When I’ve looked in Forum > Members I’ve seen that there are more visitors than the Who’s Online statement implies, The Members log makes it clear that more people are visiting than the Who’s Online section implies.

A possible way of making the site look busier without would be to enhance the Who’s Online section:

Visitors:

• since you last visited: ww
• in the last hour: xx
• today: yy
• this week: zz

Who’s Online Now:

xxx, yyy

[Maybe suppress that bit if nobody is online now].

Of course, that depends whether the forum software allows you to know that information and I suspect if might not.

What is the forum software, anyway?.

Ed likes this

[Ed]

It’s just off the shelf BBPress. I’m not going to start tinkering with the code.

[MissJD]

Sounds like a good idea. I will try to be around on the hour more. Speaking of which I’m only a few minutes off at the moment!

Martin and Ed like this

[Gary]

Hi @MissJD – both here near the hour 🙂

Martin and Ed like this

[Ed]

9pm today and there’s 5(!!) registered users on the site simultaneously. That’s great to see.

[ptHarry]

And three at 10:01

But is it helping?

Ed likes this

[Ed]

Hard to say. We’ll have to see if the number of interactions per day increases.

ptHarry likes this

[Author]

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