ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

I was looking back to the start of this new forum and was surprised to note the small number of hits those first poems have received.
In the old forum if you looked back a year or two some poems were up in the thousands of hits, does this mean we are blocking out most visitors? if so perhaps we need to rethink some of what we're doing.
This is not meant as a criticism Just idle curiosity.

Terry

yes Terry that's true. Any sugestion I tried and look what happened B.A.

Terry this forum hasn't been going 12mths yet -November I think.

Can someone tell us how long the old forum was going for. That might account for some of the numbers Terry..

I told two people at the Lawson meeting about the site and the forum and that they would need to register to see the whole site. They were both going to have a look. They haven't registered. I don't know why that is... I'd like to know why.

Heather

G/day Bill,
Something has definitely changed No one reads the old pages any more, and very few the current one after our original comments. It was not unusual for a poem to have 1000+ hits before the page turned over and continued getting hits, some many thousands.
What has happened to these viewers I wonder?



Hi Heather,
You just popped in as I was about to post, you sneaky little purple one.
On The old Forum as mentioned above a poem on the current page sometimes had a thousand hits before the page was full and many on the same page had hundreds of hits, something has changed.
I remember my first poem had well over a thousand hits before the page was full so did many others. I couldn't believe it.

Terry

G/day Marty,
I don't think it's anything to do with locals, I believe we have lost the Web Browsers for some reason, possibly because you now need to register in the old forum you didn't.
A typical page on the old forum would likely have collectively thousands of hits before the page was full, with various poems attracting from a couple of hundred hits upwards to over a thousand before that page was full.
It's food for thought if you think about it.
The only poem with massive hits on this forum (that I've found so far) is a collective one started by Ross (over 1800) there is nothing that I have seen that gets even close, and that poem was could be accessed without registering, I haven't checked the other collective poems that might had the same situation.

Terry

I remember having to register on the old forum. Or was that just to comment? Could you read without registering?

I can think of some we have lost but also a few we have gained since the new forum. Marty were you on the old one?

Heather

On the old forum you could read all the poetry but you couldn't comment unless a registered member, so you got thousands of hits from interested readers of our type of poetry, but they couldn't clog the forum with comments.
I believe there was a little trouble from time to time with people getting in and registering so they could advertise porn sites etc.


Terry

Don't forget the home page with its information, events, poetry tips etc

If you were going to open up the forum you'd have to keep the comments more strictly controlled. Maybe there could be a private spot for members to chat??

Just throwing some ideas around here..

That's right Marty, my concern (If I actually have one) is the loss of exposure.
We keep hearing that numbers are dropping and as we can clearly see here they haven't just dropped, they have plummeted.
I wonder if we really realized just how affective at getting ourselves and our poetry known and appreciated, we actually were through the forum.
Certainly food for thought.

Cheers Terry

Terry, thank you for your observations and comments. I may not have the answers you're looking for but I'm glad you raised the questions ...

The current ABPA Forum kicked off on the 1st November 2010, with Mauzie submitting the first Member's post with her piece "ODE TO A QUEENSLANDER". No-one commented on her piece and (as of a few minutes ago) it sits on 15 'views'.

Our old ABPA site had 183 'Members' and has been around from 2006 till October 2010. Frank set up and maintained the Bush Poetry site prior to that in various iterations for a few years leading up to the ABPA 'Site' in 2006.

Co-incidentally Ric's BushVerse site also has 183 'Members' and has been going since 2006.

Our current Forum membership is at 102 Members, 39 have one post or less. Another 22 have from 2 posts to 50 and the rest, 32, have posted over 50 times. So, in effect, we have 32 'active' members (if that is a good 'metric to go by).

Here are the local stats as of 0800 this morning for the Home site (NOT the Forum):
since the 1st of January people have logged on 16,630 times
these 16,630 people have looked at our pages 22,620 times.
this is an average of 68 visits per day.

I would like to believe that there are thousands of folk on the web, wanting to feast on Bush Poetry. Yes, I get THOUSANDS of applications to join our humble little Forum. So far this month over 1400 applications have been rejected. I posted some of the rejected World-wide hopefulls a couple of weeks ago.

Given the number of automated 'applications' raises a concern over Forum site security.
Managing these applications is a bit time consuming and I am currently looking at an appropriate process of mustering the bastards off a cliff.
I will in the near future schedule some Forum down time to effect some security upgrades. There will be plenty of warning.

An overseas poetry site run by a Viet Vet poet (of which myself and a couple of others from here are members), has been severely hacked. Another friend's non poetry Forum has also been hacked.
The reasons for the hacks are many, the main one is for member info, email addys etc.
For this reason I'm looking at the appropriatness of having this as a 'closed' forum - Open to all LEGITIMATE Poetry people. I welcome ANY comments on this ...
Which treminds me, I need to schedule some down time to upgrade our current Forum with new security enhancements. Trying to get my head around the upgrade process of the Forum, Yes, I do have a degree in IT, but I'm no expert and may call in some professional help on this one. Just to be safe.

Still trying to get my head around the logic of 5 year old posts getting thousands of hits and current ones only getting a handfull. I find it difficult to believe that non-forum members go looking for old posts over the newer ones.
Begs the question, how many current members 'regularly' go looking over older posts?

I read on a techie forum a while ago that the Counters on some of the earlier Forums have a funny behaviour and add 'hits' when searching related topics. The later versions of these Forums have fixed that problem. This Forum 'version' is current as of October 2010.

I picked up on a generalisation that our Forum members hide behind Nics and Aliases. This is NOT the case. The majority of the membership are known to each-other here, not only their names but families and place of abode (and if they have a preference for short-arse ponies - like Kymmie ).
As a member of a number of other sites, I believe we are unique here in NOT hiding behind encrypted Nics. We really are a mostly happy bunch of dysfunctional poets who, for the most part enjoy eachother's company - and have done for a long while now (and intend to continue that friendship).
That's as I see it ...

Attracting 'hits' to our web-site and members to our forum is another discussion and worthy of it's own topic.

Any other comments or queries, please post them - they ARE welcome ...

Cheers,


Manfred.