Member Questions to Administrators, Matters related to the Forum Options

[Astro0]

If you have a question about Unmanned Spaceflight.com, this is the place to ask it.

[Greg Hullender]

Was there a change to the rules? I read through them, but I couldn't tell what (if anything) changed. Or are they just posted in a new location?

--Greg

[nprev]

I would characterize them as tweaks rather than sweeping changes; there are no major additions or removals.

The overaching objective of this effort is to ensure that newcomers to UMSF have an appropriate introduction to the forum. You might have noticed that the admins & mods are also listed for easy refererence.

EDIT: Greg, the biggest changes are in 1.10, 2.8 and adding sections 4, 5 and 6 which compiles more general text from the old guidelines plus other discussions/circumstances had with members over recent years into a more formal format.

[Explorer1]

These changes are really nice; it's good to see that the previously unwritten rules are now written out. This will especially benefit folks who haven't had the benefit of lurking for years to see what's okay and what isn't.

[bergadder]

Folks,
Just an observation, as a project of the Planetary Society .. I would expect these ideas to be kept in mind.. especially in times of need.. and right now support is critical.. based on press attendance at the MSL conferences.
to quote "The Planetary Society, founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman, to inspire and involve the world's public in space exploration through advocacy, projects, and education."
$2.5 billion came from the public.. involve and inspire them
Avron.

ADMIN: How is this a question to the forum administrators??? Please keep the topic on subject.

[Redstone]

Would a post discussing Alan Stern's Uwingu project be a violation of Rule 1.10?

[nprev]

Yes, as well as 1.2...please read the description of the project on the link.

[Explorer1]

I've got a quick question about membership statistics: has there been a significant bump in registration and traffic since MSL landed and especially after getting namedropped on NASA TV?
Or is there some place we can see the site statistics? Alexa doesn't show very much.

[ElkGroveDan]

Yes on both counts. The number of new members is about triple what it would normally be in this period.

If you want exact numbers on views and page loads helvick should be able to answer that better than I can.

[Explorer1]

Great, I sent a PM.

[helvick]

Some highlights:

As Dan has said the rate at which we are authorizing number of new members is about triple the normal level. We don't have a massive userbase, the current number of registered users is 2830.

I don't have anything in place to track the ip-board statistics over time, that's something I'm looking at but right now I'm not aware of an easy way to get them. That said we do have some data points about the most important macro indicators of server load which is the number of concurrent users. This normally ranges between 50 and 100, with the ratio of registered users to visitors typically being around 5:1.

On the morning of the MSL launch this rose to around 350 concurrent users at 6:52AM (BST), this rose a little over the next 30 minutes but we were obviously having performance issues around 07:30AM BST, and users started to see timeouts. We made some performance tweaks to address that around 7:45 and by 7:56 we had 490 concurrent users and briefly passed 1000 concurrent users at around 8:00AM BST on August 6th. I didn't keep a record of the number of users to visitors at that time but at the peak I think we had about 300 concurrent registered users and 700 or so visitors.

As a comparison the largest previous spike that we have numbers for was at around 270 users for the Phoenix landing.

Peak Bandwidth spiked from a typical average of 300kb/sec to something north of 6Mb/sec. This is averaged over an hour by our server stats package, and the instantaneous peaks were a lot higher.

I'll update this with charts later but in terms of hits\page views\visits we peaked at 1.6 million hits, 230k page views and 40K actual visits over the course of August 6th. The data load associated with an average visit rose too, to about 5x the normal 100-200K/visit since we carried about 22GB of traffic on the 6th. Overall those numbers are about 10x our normal volume.

Things have now calmed down a lot, but we're still running slightly higher than average across the board.

[Explorer1]

That's amazing; I knew the site was put under stress at crunch time, but that's a more complete picture. Thanks so much Helvik; the charts should be impressive too.
I wonder what the next high-traffic spike event will be: I can't think of any missions off the top of my head for a while at least.

[climber]

Thanks helvick,

In the old days, Doug used to posts some satistics like this as well as the most popular topics, etc, and I personnaly miss them. I'd said having those details, say, once or twice a year would be great.
BTW, it stands incredible that Curiosity Landing topic reached 50% of Eduardo's Oppy route in no time.

[helvick]

Climber,

I'll take a stab at that too. And just to show the long term trend of total posts per month since we started back in 2004:



Offhand I can see the New Horizon's Launch peak ( Jan 2006 ), NH Jupiter flyby, Phoenix Launch ( Aug 07) and Landing ( May 2008 ) in there. General trend has been down but that is understandable given the nature of this site and the type of outreach data flow it requires to keep large numbers of people engaged. MSL should drive a lot of traffic for an extended period of time.

Note this is also just total post counts, a significant part of the reduction in volume has resulted from long term efforts to keep S/N ratio high, and since we have no post rating system in place it is not possible to tell whether the volume of _good_ posts is trending down in the longer term.

[elakdawalla]

BTW, it stands incredible that Curiosity Landing topic reached 50% of Eduardo's Oppy route in no time.

To be fair, that's because we are militant about keeping chatter out of the Oppy route thread, and were lenient in the landing thread. Most threads should be somewhere between those extremes