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If you build it, they will come!

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 11:04 am
by ElSupremo
Greetings all :)

From my mailbag:

I keep hearing the "we need newbies" song. I've also heard comments that most of the posts here come from just a handful of posters. I say SO WHAT! and WHO CARES! Because it just doesn't matter. We haven't even been online two months yet for cripes sake! We have over 130 members and growing. The active posters we have now already make us one of the elite message boards on the net for index funds and FIRE discussion IMO. And nobody even knows about us yet! But they will. As wanderer has said it's just a matter of time. NFB is not going anywhere. We have all the time in the world. I'm thrilled with the progress we've made so far. At the current rate by this time next year we will have over 1000 members who will be telling 1000 of their friends about us. The lurker count is almost that already. Our daily hit count is extraordinary! I'm perfectly satisfied at this point.

I'll tell you something else. If I wanted advise this is the place I'd go. Of course I have the advantage of knowing all of the knowledgeable members here. But the word is getting out. And to be honest I see no need to speed things up. The next few weeks should be very interesting.

Keep those cards and letters coming! :wink:

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 12:18 pm
by NeuroFool
ES-

I am pleased and happy at the existence and progress of this board, and there is no need to rush anything. I think things are going great.

But newbies are good, especially newbies who aren't afraid to ask introductory questions. While I'm sure most of us are tired of answering a question like "can you suggest a good index fund" or "I have $1000 to invest, where should I put it", it is questions like these that help the lurkers make the transition from inexperienced investors to those who understand the nuances of SWR, MVO, etc.

I guess I'm not saying anything other than the obvious: having a diverse set of posters with diverse levels of experience and questions and knowledge to share makes for a vibrant, healthy and interactive site. We have such a great collection of minds here already! And I'm excited when I can see a :idea: go off in the posts of some people as they grow and evolve and learn from this board. In that way, newbies are great to have. They can come to this site and have a tremendous resource for learning about index funds, retiring early and economics/investing in general. At the same time, the most experienced posters can discuss ad naseum whether reversion to the mean should be employed in computer simulations or whether the increased returns of small cap value can be expected to continue or just how much precious metals should we have in our portfolio. There is something for everyone here, but currently we are biased towards the details in most of the posts. Nothing wrong with that at all! But I suspect the "where are the newbies?" comments simply reflects an impatience on many people's parts to share the gospel of financial independence and empowerment.

So let's all simply do what we are doing and spread to word to our friends and things will take care of themselves. It's built, and people are coming!

And I will take this opportunity to thank EVERYONE on this board who makes it the great resource that it is. Special kudos to ES of course, and to Mark Hebner who...heh heh, sorry, just taking a pot shot at MH for some fun. I think he's a good sport. :)

Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2003 4:59 pm
by wanderer
don't push the river. go with the flow. words to live by.

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 7:29 am
by raddr
Hi ES,
Our daily hit count is extraordinary! I'm perfectly satisfied at this point.


Do you mind sharing the hit count data? I think it would be interesting. It seems like most boards have many more lurkers than actual posters.

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 10:30 am
by ElSupremo
Greetings raddr :)
Do you mind sharing the hit count data?


For a fellow infidel? Of course not. :wink: For January we averaged just under 20,000 hits per day. February is ahead of January so far. And we are well up from the last two weeks of December.

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2003 3:49 pm
by wanderer
what is a "hit"?

20,000 a day seems like a lot if i understand the term correctly (and i prolly don't).

Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2003 3:54 pm
by ElSupremo
Greetings wanderer :)

Every time someone visits the site it's a hit. A 20k avg. isn't bad for two months but I expect many times that in the future. For example I probably am responsible for 50 or so hits per day just on my own! :wink:

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2003 1:31 pm
by wanderer
but that would mean there are at least 400 "yous" out there. i imagine there are more and the average is lower. speculating...

Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2003 12:59 pm
by therealchips
For January we averaged just under 20,000 hits per day.


Do you know how people find NFB? Is it solely word of mouth and messages at TMF pointing the way to this useful alternative? As nearly as I can tell, google.com does not index NFB. Is there a way to get google to send its automatic indexing software over to read NFB? Would that be a good way to get new people here? Search expressions at google that might lead people here include obvious choices such as financial independence and early retirement and index funds and efficient market theory and safe withdrawal rate.

I searched at google just now on "financial independence" "early retirement" "index funds", using the quotation marks to tie a pair of words together into a single search term. I got about 64 hits (half of them duplicates), including at least four from fool.com, one from armchairmillionaire, and one from a site I hadn't heard of before, http://www.retirementearly.com/Apr2002.htm. One of the TMF hits was http://www.motleyfool.ie/community/pod/2000/000216.htm from Hocus, post of the day, February 16, 2000, entitled Must There be a "Purpose" after ER? and accessible without fee.

Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2003 3:48 pm
by wanderer
and one from a site I hadn't heard of before, http://www.retirementearly.com/Apr2002.htm.

dr. whipple could probably live like a dictator in the Republic of the Phillipines on the sheckels living in palm desert must cost him. :wink:

http://www.retirementearly.com/biography.htm

Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2003 4:14 pm
by ElSupremo
Greetings chips :)
Do you know how people find NFB?


Most of us have come from the old boards. We have several new members that found us by accident. Google is difficult to get listed on. From what I understand the more other sites link to you the better your chances. I've submitted us to all of the other search engines. It would be nice to get on Google though.

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 8:03 am
by peteyperson
wanderer,

With the greatest of respect to ES, the " hit " measurement is a meaningless one. No one uses it anymore.

To explain:

When you enter a web page address, the web browser sends a message to the web server where the web site is located that it wants a certain page and the web server receives that message and says " Okay bubba, here's your web page " and sends it on its way back to you across the internet. However, if your page has 10 images to load, your browser will reconnect with the web server 10 times, it will grab each image one at a time, each time registering a "hit".

Thinking about this a little with this new knowledge you now have, you could have a web page with 100 small images and it would register 100 hits from 1 visitor. If 100 people visit a single page, then it would have 10,000 "hits". A competing site could be much more efficient with design and have only 3 images, 500 visitors, and register only 1,500 "hits".

i.e.

100 visitors 10,000 hits
500 visitors 1,500 hits

Highly misleading, eh? People used to use the measurement because it can easily sound like an impressively large figure!

The correct measurement is page impressions and unique visitors. This shows how many individual page views were taken on the site as a whole (if this is rising either more people are viewing the site or perhaps the current users are viewing more posts, which you can also get an idea about by examing how long the average visitors stays for. "Stickiness"). The number of unique visitors helps determine that.

You can monitor how many pages each visitor views, even logging their path thru the site. This is often used to find flaws in the user experience. CDNow.com used this method to examine why many Japanese visitors were doing lots of searches but not buying. Turned out upon examining the path and search logs, they were typing in The Beatles but typing it in the way Japanese people hear it. It was wrong, but consistently spelt wrongly by all Japanese on the site. By viewing the logs they could see what was happening and plug the wrong spelling into the search engine to correct it on the fly and bring up The Beatles search for the wrongly spelt one when entered. Sort of working around human error in a helpful way behind the scenes..

Far more information than you wanted I'm sure, but as I'm a web developer I thought I should chime in!

Petey



wanderer wrote: what is a "hit"?

20,000 a day seems like a lot if i understand the term correctly (and i prolly don't).

Re: If you build it, they will come!

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 8:05 am
by peteyperson
I'm pleased to hear things are looking good here on the message boards. It certainly seems that a lot of the better posters have ventured over and joined in one the discussions. There is also a nice mix of types of people, age, experience, sexes etc. Dare I say it, even a few "foreigners" :wink:

Good balance overall. I'm certainly sticking around.

Petey


ElSupremo wrote:
I'll tell you something else. If I wanted advise this is the place I'd go. Of course I have the advantage of knowing all of the knowledgeable members here. But the word is getting out. And to be honest I see no need to speed things up. The next few weeks should be very interesting.

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 9:40 am
by therealchips
Hi, ES :)
It would be nice to get on Google though.

Yesterday I inserted a link from my personal page to NFB. My ISP, Earthlink, supports that page for me at no additional cost, and google indexes it. Few people ever view my page, but that link cannot hurt. Now I will watch to see if google updates its indexing of my page.

BTW, how did my uses of the word "google" turn gold in earlier posts? Am I creating a maintenance nuisance for you?

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 9:44 am
by ElSupremo
Greetings all:)

Pete wrote:
The correct measurement is page impressions and unique visitors. This shows how many individual page views were taken on the site as a whole (if this is rising either more people are viewing the site or perhaps the current users are viewing more posts, which you can also get an idea about by examing how long the average visitors stays for. "Stickiness"). The number of unique visitors helps determine that.


This is more or less correct. In an effort to simplify things I used the familiar term "hit" without going into specifics. I don't know how other providers calculate this but the one we utilize uses both the above and other variables in a rather complex formula to determine something they call "true hits". So with all due respect to Pete the actual "visitor count" on this site is around 20k "unique" visits per day according to our provider.(Whatever that may mean:?) Is this a dead accurate number? Probably not but it does give you some idea of how many times the site has been visited. I hope that clears up any misunderstanding.

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 9:53 am
by ElSupremo
Greetings Chips :)
Yesterday I inserted a link from my personal page to NFB.


Thanks Chips! I don't pretend to understand all this stuff but I believe it's the number of links that's important and not how active the linkers are that determines whether Google picks you up. Also I think there are other factors involved as well. I do know it can be difficult to get Googled. :?
BTW, how did my uses of the word "google" turn gold in earlier posts? Am I creating a maintenance nuisance for you?


Someone may have snuck a cookie into your cookie jar. :wink:I'd check that first.

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 5:13 pm
by wanderer
es, petey -

good to have net savvy people like youselves here.

query: es, is it proprietary or could we see the complex formula for calculating unique visits? inquiring minds... :wink:

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2003 7:12 am
by ElSupremo
Greetings wanderer :)
is it proprietary or could we see the complex formula for calculating unique visits? inquiring minds...


We were thinking alike on this because I was curious also. I was told in not so many words that it was none of my business and just a service they provided. I did find out (From someone outside) that they use url's in some fashion in this calculation along with the points Pete brought up. I could really care less but it is fun to look at! :wink: