How does Fluther usage fluctuate throughout the seasons?

You should see what happens on April Fool’s Day, although since our founders left, it has gotten pretty tame.

Supposedly. Personally, I think the site has just been slow and getting slower for a long while now.

I think it has definitely slowed down over the Christmas holidays. We need to think of some really interesting questions to get things going again. I will work on it. (but don’t hold your breath)

You should see what happens on Easter. I think @YARNLADY knows a little something about that. :D

But as @ANef_is_Enuf mentions, in the past year, I noticed that the activity here dropped a little, all year round. I’ve been here for two years though, maybe that isn’t enough time to really tell, but the last year was a lot more slow than the previous.

In general, it gets slower at this time of year, picks up during school holidays, and is fairly steady at other times. It has definitely been slower all around this past year, ever since Google launched Panda and our search engine hits dropped significantly.

@Symbeline Activity did drop, a lot. It is all because of the Panda Google update, which labeled us as a content farm. You can see what it did here by zooming back to this February. Fluther traffic instantly dropped like a rock and never recovered.

February 23, 2011— 32,997 visits
February 24, 2011— 16,662 visits
zoom forward a bit..
December 29, 2011— 7,791 visits

We are currently back to late 2008 levels of traffic.

@PhiNotPi wow, that is shocking.

What if we all asked our three questions per day for a while?

@marinelife I’m not sure I could come up with three good questions per day. That would be a real challenge.

@dappled_leaves oh, but that kind of works… because inevitably people will start asking questions about “the quality of the questions on Fluther,” and that still results in more questions. ;)

@marinelife Someone should organize that. If we get enough people involved, it might do something.

Well, I just asked one!

Squeezed out my last one for the day. I have to start brainstorming questions for tomorrow.

I like this idea, anyhow. It’s fun to have little goals, and I can’t see how it wouldn’t perk things up around here a bit.

@PhiNotPi Wow…7000 visits? That sucks. :(

@augustlan may tell me off for this, but perhaps we should have a question bank. So, if you have more than three quality questions for the day, you place one in a bank so someone else who can’t think of one can ask it that day. OR you can write it down and ask it tomorrow!

I don’t think having more questions will help. I have read up a lot on this and from what I gather Fluther adding rel=nofollow to all outbound links on the site is what is hurting it. It seems stupid to still have it added to all links since the mods delete spam so fast.

I brought this up here a few months ago and nothing was ever done. It seems like a simple thing to do and it doesn’t hurt even if it doesn’t help.

@Augustlan, can we follow up on @johnpowell‘s suggestion? I don’t actually know what that means but perhaps we can ask the founding fathers whether they can do that? Even as a trial to see what happens?

@Bellatrix @johnpowell It’s on the list.

Thank you @augustlan :-)

@Bellatrix :: I remember when they added the code to inject rel=nofollow. All that is needed is to delete (or comment out) the few lines of code they wrote to add it. It should only take a few minutes.

Either they think it won’t help or they don’t care.