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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Great, I sent a PM.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Click to view attachment

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.

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

Emily & Helvick, thanks... And I've got the point.

Some long term info for those interested in the volume of traffic over time.

Click to view attachment

If you want to dig into the data a bit more you can play with the chart a bit and see the details, including the most popular topic for each month since UMSF began by following this link:
UMSF Monthly Stats Posts, Topics, Registrations and Views

I'm trying to find an easy way to show traffic by day for those interested in specific events but for the record the top 3 busiest days ever in terms of posts have been:

Aug 6th 2012 - 569 ( MSL Landing )
May 26th 2008 - 499 ( Phoenix Landing)
Jan 19th 2006 - 369 ( New Horizons Launch )

MSL has caused an enormous spike in traffic. We had more topic views on MSL on the 6th of August than we had on the entire board between April 1st and August 5th.

For a more general snapshot of how MSL has affected traffic here are some comparisons of our August traffic vs cumulative traffic over the past year or two as reflected in the number of views per topic, sorted by popularity for the given period. I'm still trying to figure out how to present these in a sustainable way but if you are just interested in the trending stuff this will give you some answers.

Click to view attachment

Two final bits of info.

The all time top 3 Topics in terms of views are:
Opportunity: 8,198,261
Spirit: 4,917,572
Cometary and Asteroid Missions: 2,559,320

MSL is currently #13 at 1,246,743 ., age clearly counts for something.

I'm using the term "Topic" here the way the IP-Board admin panel's stats page does because that is giving me the numbers. We usually call them Forums or sub-forums and refer to individual threaded discussions as Topics but I'm not using the term that way here. Just in case anyone is confused.

And that's pretty much exactly what I was asking for. I wonder how much bigger the current spike will get over time.
Thanks again helvick!

Would discussion of this relatively recently published paper be banned here due to potential astrobiology content?

Yes. Try NASASpaceflight.com, the BAUT forums, or the Yellow Forum.

I noted the reminder about rule 1.3, so I reread it.

I'm pretty sure that it used to say astrobiology *could* be discussed ONLY within the strict context of specific, related mission goals.

Am I misremembering? And if I'm not, can someone say something about the problems that caused the tightening up?

Lastly, I appreciate the acknowledgement that a future change might be appropriate. I do understand the tsunami you are keeping at bay, but the idea that the very concept of "organics" cannot be discussed in a forum devoted to a mission looking for them is...quite remarkable, whatever the provocations that spurred it.

Cheers.

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ic=7514&hl=

Thank you for the pointer. I looked for that context but was unable to find it.

A personal message highlights that I was unclear above. When I said "forum devoted to" I was referring to the rule applying to the MSL forum, devoted to Curiosity. Sorry about that. Though I'm not very active, I have been around here for years, following Oppy & Spirit -- and sometimes even non-Mars missions! 8^)

I would be very interested in a reply to Floyd's question, which he asked in response to the rule-modification notice you kindly linked to above:
My only question is about organics. I can see not trying to link detection of organic compounds to astrobiology, but does this remove all discussion of compounds containing Carbon? Are we not to discuss minerals containing carbonate? Does this mean that Juramike's fantastic lessons on atmospheric chemistry are unwelcome. Maybe you could clarify this a bit...

Edit: maybe make a distinction between organic compounds as in organic chemistry and biological compounds as in biochemistry... No need to kill carbon, it is a perfectly good element.

This place was founded long before MSL even left the drawing board - it's certainly not 'devoted' to MSL. It was started as a place for people to share/compare/discuss the processing of imagery from Spirit, Opportunity and then Cassini. Yes - it has well grown outside that remit - but that remains the core purpose of UMSF. It was never nor is it 'devoted to' MSL.

In many respects - what you are saying is that it's remarkable that there's no soccer game being played in the middle of a cricket pitch.

The astrobio rule (and latterly the manned spaceflight rule) were put in place and maintained to maintain UMSF as a home for the discussions for which it was intended - without the flame wars, arguments and other digital blights one can see on any number of other internet venues when the question of astrobiology arises. That is the provocation that spurred it - to defend the core founding purpose of UMSF from the fringe theories and craziness that often blights places that invite those conversation. It was never intended to be all forums for all people. That's how and why I founded the place and currently, how the admin team are running the place.

Will rules have to be tweaked and adjusted to accommodate sensible discussion - no doubt. But history tells us that people will abuse that opportunity and generate unnecessary work for the admin/mod team.

Remember - this is not the only forum on the web. Many other forums exist for the discussions of spaceflight, MSL, astrobiology and so on. If anyone feels a compunction to discuss things outside the remit of UMSF - they are, of course, free to have that discussion elsewhere.

I'm not a moderator, but not all carbon compounds are considered organic. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound, "a few types of carbon-containing compounds such as carbides, carbonates, simple oxides of carbon (such as CO and CO2), and cyanides, as well as the allotropes of carbon such as diamond and graphite, are considered inorganic."

That said, rule 1.3 says no organics, and modern chemistry gives an adequate definition of what "organic" means IMHO.

Two of MSL's four science goals are strictly astrobiological, so clearly they run outside the rules here.

http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/ScienceGoals/

However, whatever the goals are, that doesn't translate into a proportional breakdown of mission activity or relevance to the day-by-day activities. I think it's clear that MSL's intended activity will generate enough data to write a few books purely on the geological aspects of Mars. The single greatest focus of its activity will be to characterize what is expected to be a past era that was warmer and wetter and Ph neutral. Assuming it operates successfully, that will leave a vast amount to say within the context of this board. Not to mention all of the other eras it may give us a peek into as it climbs higher: The history book of Mars's early geology and the corresponding climate. That's quite a broad set of topics.

You're right; that's a major contrast between MSL and Viking. When I was interviewing Matt Golombek for my articles on MSL, I asked him if MSL was "Viking on wheels," since they're similar-size spacecraft with similar-sized payloads, and he said sort of, but mostly not; Viking "swung for the fences" in life discovery, while MSL has different science goals, and an instrument suite to back them up, that will produce major scientific results no matter what it discovers.

What Emily said.

And my cheap two cents worth:

We aren't touching astrobiology. We're just not. Not indirectly, not obliquely, not for love, and not for money.

I hope by now that is abundantly clear.

If it's not...please feel free to PM me for clarification, and esp. before posting anything related to the subject...but please be sure to read rule 1.3 first.

Hello. I'm having a problem viewing the last posts in a thread (any thread). Here is a screenshot of what I see. Please let me know what's up. I have sent a message to a mod with no response, yet. Thanks.

Looks like your viewing options have been changed to Outline mode.
Look under the 'Options' button upper right and change the Display Mode to 'Standard'.
That'll fix it.

Thanks, Astro. I never knew I could do that (change the type of view) in a forum. Awesome!

Often it's clicking through search engine results that seems to do it. For whatever reason, Google spiders that view sometimes.

Ok Admins…

I need to throw this at ya…..

There was a conference earlier this month at UCLA on Mars Habitability: link below

http://planets.ucla.edu/meetings/mars-habi...y-2013/program/

A lot of fascinating talks on possibility of transient liquid water near the surface. Alfred McEwen gives a 30 min update on Mars RSL (Recurring Slope Lineae). They are now identifying sites at Vallis Marineris that track the sun. Also updates on Phoenix results are presented. Chemistry of perchlorates. A 60 min talk by Aswhin Vasavada on early MSL results from Gale (this is as of 02/04/2013) which I have not had time to watch yet.

Those are in the early sessions.

I have thought of posting the link in the discussion thread on 'List of Evidence of Water on Mars'. But the later talks concentrate on the possibilities for current life on Mars. A taboo subject here. Hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Take a look and see what you think. I could just post links to the earlier sessions.

Craig

Craig,

Post the links to the speific papers, that fine.
Even the conference link is OK.

If we stopped every link to a space-related conference just because there might be a reference, paper or hallway chat about 'life' then we wouldn't have any links at all.

Members are fully aware of the rules on discussion of this issue on UMSF.
Referring to a conference where it might be one of a hundred topics does not breach that rule.
One caveat would be if the conference was specific to that topic.

Thanks Astro0...

I will post ...