Boards.ie Stats - January 2022

Boards.ie: Odhran

Hi - We mentioned last month that we would share some KPI’s around traffic, posting etc which will allow us to monitor key metrics as we continue on our journey.

Moving on from the rocky migration we are starting to see a return of users, contributors and traffic. Overall the numbers are positive and growing.  We are seeing positive growth across all metrics. We are still struggling from an ad revenue standpoint - particularly Google ads and while our ad view-ability is high, CPM’s are low and even with our high volume of traffic they are not converting. We are actively implementing fixes here.

Our active user count below illustrates daily users who are engaging with the site.  This does not mean we have this level of contributors - these users are active on the site - i.e. logging in and engaging with content.  If we look back to October of last year for a comparison we have gone from an average of about 4200 users per day.

Our active user count continues as we welcome another 1,907 users to the platform in January.

Post count will lag significantly behind user engagement however our daily post tally continues to grow. Looking back to October our highest daily post count for the month was 6,269 with an average of about 4200.  January 2022 see us hit and average of 5663 with a high of 6,613.

Participation rate is up slightly from last quarter at about 1% and we saw 6 new movers on the most discussions board.  We will make this more widely available over the coming weeks.

REMOVING TOP 10 POSTERS.

We switched to GA4 last year so measurement to pre migration is difficult. Traffic overall is growing month on month.  Below shows our traffic for January v’s December (which we would expect to be quieter…) however our active and 30 day active user count are all showing positive gains.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/HI2NgnZZxVyg9ThlR89mpfrYG_Y1qtHsvvnRWqur2SFDTQxYmkw3Rh2taX8kcGNCnBI0jM7XEp5meOEhlVIpVIRENI2avd37PjpKBr89PBkCL-9KqsUB8Z3lTvZPBZtpp32e6dsP

30-Day Active Users: the number of unique users who initiated sessions on your site or app from January 1 through January 28 (the entire 28 days of your date range).

Keep an eye out for February stats where we will hopefully follow the same trend.

Thanks

Odhran

CoBo55

Can't say I'm seeing that in the threads I'm following, many of them are dead in the water. Nice to see the mods have been throttled back. The amount of Ad's on the mobile site are ridiculous, sometimes too many Ad's have a negative effect.

Dempo1

I'm personally enjoying the new format but my god the adverts horrendous, especially the banner one at bottom page , designed it would seem to click on accidentally.

I may have to consider an ad blocker

Tow

When you get the GDPR popup, opt out of all the trackers etc. This appears to stop the adverts, you just get gray placeholders.

MEGA BRO WOLF 5000

How this compare to old boards? We need context here. As far as I can see the place is still dead.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118607186#Comment_118607186

I don't get any ads at all thanks to the inbuilt ad blocker in my browser, Edge Chromium but Chrome should be the same.

I note you're using Google Analytics. Be aware that it has just been declared as incompatible with GDPR by the French CNIL (DPC equivalent) and a French website has been ordered to stop using it.

Use of Google Analytics and data transfers to the United States: the CNIL orders a website manager/operator to comply | CNIL

OU812

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118607010#Comment_118607010

I use them on iOS & it’s a fantastic* ad free experience everywhere.

*the actual user experience of using boards is really bad since the “upgrade”, but at least there’s no ads

Dempo1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118611595#Comment_118611595

I'm using Android, Adverts don't bother me , I just ignore but the banner adverts at the bottom of the page annoying and it would seem deliberately positioned to accidentally click them, the advert travels up the page when keyboard activate, incredibly off putting.

Boards.ie: Niamh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118611653#Comment_118611653

That ad should disappear once the keyboard has been activated. Is it staying in place for you?

Dempo1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118611667#Comment_118611667

Hi Niamh, hope your well, unfortunately it doesn't, for example as I type, it's pop's up, actually blank, just says advertisement, stays for a while, pop's out and pop's up again. I'm using latest version of Android. I'd imagine on a small screen device, it would be a nightmare. I actually have to scroll the screen up so I can see what I've typed.

Also if a user is using text prediction (I think that's what it's called) or emoji search, it seems to cause the advert to go slightly crazy (if I'm making sense ) 😏

I guess for shorter posts, it's not so bad but longer posts, advert pop's in an out.

I do appreciate adverts important of course.

But this all said and Apart from this issue, I like the new format 😏

I have the grey spaces where ads used to be thanks to my ad blocker. Trouble is advertisers must be seriously discouraged by the availability of AdBlockers. If ads were more judiciously used people wouldn’t be going to such effort to block them, as there is a human instinct to want to see product availability, but within reason and so it doesn’t interfere with the UX

Dempo1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118612196#Comment_118612196

Well said, Well Said 😁

OU812

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118612196#Comment_118612196

I do t have any grey spaces or ad at the bottom, just a plain ad free experience

Wossack

My issue with ad’s on iOS is the screen jumping up and down as they are periodically refreshed. I can be scrolling and then there is a hop, and I have to backtrack to find where I was… Makes for a very frustrating experience

CoBo55

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118622671#Comment_118622671

Same on Android. I've been on for 15 minutes and most of the threads I follow have had little or no movement so that me finished until tomorrow. Site is doomed I fear.

Dial Hard

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118611667#Comment_118611667

For me, it disappears initially when I start to type, then pops back up after a few seconds. It's incredibly annoying.

smuggler.ie

Statistics thread suddenly turned into bugs/complaints ...

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118622671#Comment_118622671

Yay! My grey spaces are obviously being refreshed in the background. The bumping up and down of the screen on iOS is maddening, happens in some other sites as well. You completely lose track of where you were, boils the blood a little.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118624113#Comment_118624113

Well stats vary with user experience so the drift is somewhat related.

Bobeagleburger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118624080#Comment_118624080

I don't see any ads. I must have cookies disabled or something

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058232131/boards-ie-stats-january-2022

Have people agreed to be identified in this Top 10 list? While I know that the underlying data is in the public domain, this kind of analysis would not be easily done.

I'm not sure at all that everyone would be happy to be publicly named in this way.

Inviere

Still no way to multi quote posts...

Still no way to selectively quote parts of posts...

Any sign of those basic/fundamental discussion forum features returning?? I'd much rather read about missing features returning than I would metrics (which frankly aren't surprising given how utterly broken the site was for so long)

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118634188#Comment_118634188

It would certainly seem to go against GDPR and the spanking the French website got as mentioned earlier.

At the very least one of the "new" accounts might need a look.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118644848#Comment_118644848

Still no way to multi quote posts...

Just hit the quote button on each post you want to quote

Still no way to selectively quote parts of posts...

You mean like this?

It was a faff to do on the old site and it's a faff to do on the new site, it's just a different faff

Inviere

Thanks re the multi quote, good to know. Can you share how you got selective quoting to work? Cheers

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118650672#Comment_118650672

It is a different faff and a much less useful result. it just appears as a piece of quoted text but there is no link back to the original as you could do in the previous version. to get a link back to the original you have to quote the hole post and separately quote the bits you want.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118652335#Comment_118652335

Yeah exactly, still a faff, just different. I'm honestly not sure how it could be done in a more efficient manner. Even the old way was a pain

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118650898#Comment_118650898

Just copy the text from the original post that you want to specifically reply to then use the quote option in the text box and paste the text you copied. I always use the quote option on the original post too so that it can easily be seen who you are replying to.

Like I said a faff, but imho better than messing with the old quote tagging, but only marginally.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118652563#Comment_118652563

Yeah exactly, still a faff, just different. I'm honestly not sure how it could be done in a more efficient manner. Even the old way was a pain

Not just different but also a less useful result. what they could do is make the quoted block editable. this is what vBulletin and practically every other BBS does.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118652607#Comment_118652607

Yeah, same result, different faff.

One massive benefit of the new way is its no longer possible to have massively long quote strings made up of a silly amount of posts. Those were just stupid