Ok - I know - a totally pointless stat, but I've noticed that we've passed 1,000,000 topic views

We're actually on 1,186,771 - but I hadnt looked for ages

1382 topics, 20259 posts, and we're now averaging almost exactly 100 posts per day, and 4 away from our 500'th member

We have a LOT of lurkers

For the technical end - August saw a use of 30.64 Gig (1/4 of the limit) - and trending current growth we're safe for some time to come - certainly the next 12 months are looking rosie, and donations have helped ensure we can upgrade if need be when the time comes.

What on earth happened on August 24th by the way - we shifted double the usual data then! Was it the Husband hill pans?

Doug

But how many of those are Ustrax reloading the Ultreya thread?

I'll check the stats....

Don't you know Doug?...Ultreya as Elk said (and the better is still to come...), your article on SpaceDaily, the 'Spirit arrived' thread, the panoramas, Homeplate...
That was a day...Oh what a day...
I'll quote myself:

' hihihihihihohohohihihi!!!

I'm loosing my mind with all the things happening in such a short time!'

Oh...Just a small recuerdo...
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b14/ustrax3/cong.jpg

927,876 of them





Doug

I demand some light on the aby...er...issue!

Oh August was a busy month, I noticed too

Unique visitors 1468
Number of visits 2227
Pages 11609
Hits 65308
Bandwidth 14.99 GB

Congrats on that million views!!

Nico

Doug,

When it does come time for an upgrade, be sure to put out a forum-wide request for more donations. I would be happy to contribute. And if you have a PayPal account, donations would be even easier!

David

I'm curious Doug if there was a lurker spike during Hayabusa's landing attempts, or that 3-week period. I noticed a bunch of new members with Japanese sounding names on those threads.

If so, I would guess they were either Japanese bloggers with an interest in space, or advertising and marketing executives from the Lipovitan Company.

It's not obvious, but there is a 'front page' to this site - Here

See 'Recommeded Sites' at the bottom-left.

I must really get around to chucking Doug some cash myself sometime, this place is definately worth it...

James

Hehe. Yeah, it's called the Front Page, but it really is one of the 'back alley's of the forum. I've long wondered why it held that status, but it seems intentional. If you go to http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com, which one would expect to be the "front page," you find all of the main forum topics, resplendent with abundant replies and new topics of interest to our diverse membership.

On the Front Page, one will find some very interesting information, though not as much traffic. You need to make the extra effort to go around to the back door to find this place. It seems it really should have a different name. Hey, this says it all. A lovely product of this forum (Steve Squyres Q'n'a - The Transcript) was featured here, but old comment #8 was the last reply in that summary thread. It deserved more praise than that, didn't it?


This is kind of a different thought, but I always found it curious that we had so many excellent space enthusiasts from Japan in the Hayabusa threads, but none or few of them jumped off to explore other space topics here. A while ago, I searched for those members, and their posts on this forum, and noticed that they posted messages pretty much exclusively to the Hayabusa threads.

Yeah - the 'front' page is an odd thing - I figure that it's quite usefull, but most people just want to get to the good stuff and would bookmark the forums anyway. I THINK i'd have to 'move' the whole of the forums to umsf.com/forum and then the front page would work properly - but if I was going to do that, I'd want to have something better as the front page.

I dont want to shamelessly pimp the whole paypal thing all the time anyway - it would get annoying. Including hosting and forum software, donations have matched the running costs almost exactly so far.

Doug

Thanks James, for the heads-up. This is the first I had heard of the "Front Page".

I made my donation yesterday. Now for the next question. Is UMSF considered a non-profit organization? In other words, can I deduct my donation from my US income taxes?

I don't expect Doug knows much about the US tax code, but I figure some of the many US advanced members would know.

I am no tax expert, but my recollection is that in order for a contribution to be tax deductible for U.S. income tax purposes, the receiving organization must be dominantly in the United States and it must have qualifed under Section 501©(3) of the US Tax Code as a corporation organized exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes.

I doubt either test can be met at this point. But if Doug ever gets a U.S. server, I'd be happy to help in submitting an application for 501©(3) status for UMSF.

Phillip

The place is hosted in the US ( www.imhosted.com ) - but I have no idea what that means for tax. I'm a Brit - the only sign I see is that two big chunks of salary never make it to my bank account, and go to Mr N.I.Contribution and Mr I.Tax

Doug

Well do we already have a 500th member ?
If so, who's she or he

Philip
http://mars-literature.skynetblogs.be/

We have 606

Doug:

You could always register UMSF as a 'religion' in the US - that's what my wife calls it, anyway!

Bob Shaw

I'm a believer! And after today's court decision preventing "1nte11igent design" from being forced into high school biology courses, maybe there's hope for the rest of the country, too.

Sept 14th - 1,000,000 total views (in 18 months of forum life)

December 21st - 2,087,967 (so an extra million in 3.5 months)

Wow

Doug

Have you got enough history to draw a graph?

Chris

It's odd - I can have a graph of posts, members etc per month

But post views is just a total totted up subforum by subforum.

BUT

I could go back and poll it for the stats up to each month in turn and do it that way

It'll take a while, I'll see if I can do it tonight inbetween banzai Opportunity Map Making

Doug

No pressure....

Chris