Popularity contest

[Dr Unne]

If you're like me, you spend <em>hours</em> worrying about how popular EoFF is compared to other Final Fantasy message boards. I can hardly sleep at night.

vBulletin boards happily display how many users are currently logged in, right on the front page. Last night I wrote a little Ruby script that automatically runs every 15 minutes to record how many visitors are currently online at the top 20 or so (as reported by Google) Final Fantasy message boards. I ignored non-vBulletin boards (all of which are extremely small, from what I can tell) which leaves 17 MBs. Today when I got home from work I had a nice little pile of data waiting for me.

There are some caveats here of course; for example these numbers largely depend on the (I believe configurable) timeout after which vBulletin will consider a member no longer visiting; a longer timeout will inflate the numbers. However let's work under the assumption that all the MBs are using sane and comparable timeouts.

This is a chart of one day of data including lurkers:



Lurkers are probably skewing the results given how many of them are search engine spiders. So I separately plotted only the non-lurkers (i.e. only logged in real human members):



Now we can all rest easy.

[nik0tine]

This is smurfing hot.

[Zeromus_X]

That's impressive, Dr. Unne.

I had no clue FFNet was even on the top 20 of anything. xD

[Roto13]

I like how the pretty lines go up and down.

[XxSephirothxX]

Who knew adventchildren.net was so popular....with the bots. Kinda nice to see we come out pretty much at the top of the pack.

[Leeza]

Our 6:00 a.m. time slot needs improvement.

[SnoopyG]

I'm part of that red line

[Yamaneko]

Congrats to all the winners.

[Raistlin]

This reminds me of the time when I made the thread about how EoFF had just become the #1 FF-related EzBoard. My thread was cooler.

[Bahamut2000X]

I think it's cause of the best smilie ever.

This reminds me of the time when I made the thread about how EoFF had just become the #1 FF-related EzBoard. My thread was cooler.

Yours isn't scientific though. With pretty color and numbers.

[Raistlin]

Yours isn't scientific though.

It was by total posts, which is about as scientific as we could get with EzBoards.

[Bahamut2000X]

But...he has charts with pretty colors and wrote programming...PROGRAMMING MAN! Egads that there is as scientific as I can possibly think of.

[vorpal blade]

I'm part of that red line

What a coincidence, so am I!

I'm also a part of the purple line near the bottom.

[Eiko Guy]

I like that its very informative. I didnt expect us to be soo high up. I log on quite often so..you're welcome.

[Yuriev's ghost]

The second graph is pretty much what I expected. EoFF, ACF and FFShrine are the most notorious FF forums, in any case.