What's Going On?

[Craig]

Hitting record numbers of visitors lately. Any reasons people can think of? It's not like there is an Olympic interest spike to hit right now...

Craig

[Sciurus-Rex]

It's all about you, Craig.

I've been seeing a lot of messages like this on bathroom walls lately: "For a good time, visit ((insert Internet address here)) and ask for ((name))." According to the rest of the message, you're quite the little party animal!

[misha]

Originally Posted by Craig

Hitting record numbers of visitors lately. Any reasons people can think of? It's not like there is an Olympic interest spike to hit right now...

Craig

May be because fencingsucks.com is dead?


.

[D'Artag-NOT]

The competitive season is winding down (for college fencing, anyway) and fencers are crazy for a fencing fix.

Plus Craig.

[qatet]

Originally Posted by misha

May be because fencingsucks.com is dead?


.

Hunh. What happened? (And does this mean that we're about to get more trolls and NYC pissing contests?)

[misha]

Originally Posted by qatet

Hunh. What happened? (And does this mean that we're about to get more trolls and NYC pissing contests?)

I do not know what happened to it...

When I noticed more and more threads here that I thought belonged to fencingsucks.com rather than to fencing.net,
I wanted to suggest those posters to go where they belong ...
But unfortunately the place was dead


.

[KD5MDK]

People spread it by word of mouth, but new people come in faster than old ones leave?

[Larrison]

It must be the new USFA publicity campaign kicking into high gear!!


*oh* You mean there isn't a USFA publicity campaign to stir up interest in the sport?

/scarcasm off/

[Epee Scherma]

Originally Posted by qatet

Hunh. What happened? (And does this mean that we're about to get more trolls and NYC pissing contests?)

Well if we get any pissing contests, then they can go in the hardly used NYC discussion section at the bottom of main discussion board.

I've noticed a growth in participation in the past three months too. Have you noticed that we have more responses and threads created than the front page can handle? Going to the last page on the board doesn't bring you very far back in time either. I sense that there is a much greater amount of participation by new members lately. I would figure this growth is probably going to continue exponentially too.

[_fence(1)]

I guess being number 1 site on google for search term "fencing" helps...

[mlr2fence]

....and because the USFA website is so frequently 'down' people come here for info.....

[larkmaj]

Originally Posted by _fence(1)

I guess being number 1 site on google for search term "fencing" helps...

that certainly helps, plus the more threads created the more often the site pops up Google. There have been more than a few times when I was looking for more information on something I read on a thread and one of the first things that popped up on Google was the same thread or one with a similar topic.

[FencingKitten]

And maybe the "discuss this tournament" link from askfred.net has actually caught attention?

[Gav]

American fencers waste too much time online?

It can only be a good thing. I've often compared the UK forum to how this one was about 4 years ago. The UK forum has that "New Community" feel although we are now moving out of that with an established base and newcomers gradually trickling in. My guess is that, in niche areas such as fencing, eventually you reach a critical mass where you are seen as somewhere to get information. I think fencing.net has reached that point.

A reasonable mature, mostly self-policing (ha) community, that's also useful is attractive when compared to other unreliable or 'abusive' sites.

[Grasshopper]

Craig,

You got "Yahoo! Slurp Spider" all over the place...whatever that is...

[Grasshopper]

Why are you crawling my site?
Yahoo! Slurp is Yahoo!'s web-indexing robot. The Yahoo! Slurp crawler collects documents from the Web to build a searchable index for search services using the Yahoo! search engine. These documents are discovered and crawled because other web pages contain links directing to these documents.
As part of the crawling effort, the Yahoo! Slurp crawler will take robots.txt standards into account to ensure we do not crawl and index content from those pages whose content you do not want included in Yahoo! Search Technology. If a page is disallowed to be crawled by robots.txt standards, Yahoo! will not read or use the contents of that page. The URL of a protected page may be included in Yahoo! Search Technology as a "thin" document with no text content. Links and reference text from other public web pages provide identifiable information about a URL and may be indexed as part of web search coverage.

[mrbiggs]

I think that it's either February vacation or JOs.

Probably JOs.

Those are just my guesses, though.

[Craig]

Originally Posted by Grasshopper

Craig,

You got "Yahoo! Slurp Spider" all over the place...whatever that is...

I was thinking that a good bit of the traffic may be a normal search engine bot update, but they are usually fairly steady and not hitting all at once.

[foilz]

Any time there is a controversy -- in the private and public sectors, or in the news media -- public interest peaks.

It's measured by emails, phone calls, news stories, the works. Any kind of human activity.

If we look at fencing, well, USFA, if we hadn't already noticed, is currently under attack by insurgents who want to out the incumbents.

As we all know, there has been a lot of noise among fencing.net members.

And if you aren't a fencing.net member, there is only one place to go for fencing news.

Your site, Craig.

I think that may be your anomaly.

[Grasshopper]

Originally Posted by Craig

I was thinking that a good bit of the traffic may be a normal search engine bot update, but they are usually fairly steady and not hitting all at once.

I just checked "Who's Online". There 13 pages of Slurp Spider looking at the forum... is that normal?