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We are now at 500 days, a critical milestone!

Unfortunately, we are kind of in the bad side of things with only one "Excellent" stat according to Area 51:

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A simple breakdown of stats (compared with those at the one year mark:

  • Questions per day: Hasn't changed at all after 135 days! The bad thing about that is that we need about 11 times the asking to be healthy! We need more questions, more good on-topic questions!

  • Answered: We went down from 92% to 91% and I sincerely hope we keep this stat at least 91 percent. This is our only good stat so far.

  • Avid Users: Eh, we are at least half way on all stats. More participation would surely help here. With only three 3k rep users at this point, this is actually quite slow in terms of progress. We did go up 6 users in the 200+ rep side though so we are slowly building some active users!

  • Answer Ratio: We went up by 0.1 to 2! This is a pretty good stat itself as it shows that users are thinking and finding alternate answers to various questions (no, questions are not too broad). The only problem is that it's only okay...

  • Visits Per Day: We went from 77 to 96, a 24% increase! The things that is scary is that we're supposed to have 1,500 views per day, making this stat only a mere 6 percent than what it is expected! If we take the okay stat of 500 views, we are only about 19 percent of the way there!

So what do the stats say overall? We need more people! We have low questions per day... because we have very few people asking and fewer on-topic questions. We only have 92 avid users... it should be 150. We have 96 visits per day because we have very few people. I sincerely believe that without more users, this site will fail due to incredibly low activity. The last message in chat up to this point... 3 days ago!

This site has a great group of users and moderators to represent this site. The thing is, when people say things like "Be an example for others!", you need the "others" (other users) to be an example for. This site sure is a hidden gem except it's too hidden as of now.

As discussed multiple times, this site has very little activity. As of August 19, 2017 (yesterday), we have reached 500 days old and I congratulate the site for reaching this far. But we need to face the music: if we don't get more users, this might be one of our last milestones.

IMPORTANT POINTS TL;DR:

  • We've improved as a site and as individual users

  • We still need a lot of users (active users)

  • Happy 500 day anniversary!

Anything you want to add about our site up to this point? Add your thoughts in an answer!

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  • Note that the 0.9 questions per day may be a temporary peak. We have long been at 0.5 questions per day, and in the week before the "500 day milestone" we were at 0.1 questions per day for several days in a row.
    – Tsundoku Mod
    Aug 22, 2017 at 14:29

2 Answers 2

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Like you mentioned in the post, our activity has been following an upward trend in terms of how many new users have joined the site and in terms of the number of answers per questions. One thing I would keep in mind is that many of the recommended numbers on the Area 51 page are outdated and haven't been updated in years. It's been said several times since that the only important metric that is necessary for graduation is the questions per day, which should be 10 or higher.

Over time, I think we'll continue to attract more and more new users, who will then, in turn ask more questions, which will attract even more users. The way we have to get that cycle started is by ensuring that our site's scope is understandable and approachable to new users, advertise on related websites, and ask high-quality questions, so new users will have good examples to look up to.

Happy 500 days!

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  • If you don't mind, could you provide where it says that the questions per day is the only important metric? I'm not trying to criticize or saying you're making stuff up, I just would like to know.
    – Anthony Pham
    Aug 21, 2017 at 20:47
  • @AnthonyPham here. "When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation."
    – fi12
    Aug 22, 2017 at 0:07
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I see several things we can do now:

  • Increase our answer ratio, which has consistently been at 2.0 instead of 2.5. With the current number of questions, that would required adding around 400 answers.
  • Promote our site. There is no lack of site promotion ideas; it's a matter of finding time to put these ideas into action. (Note to self: finish that YouTube video.) We should also try to reach language teachers, since we are currently strongly biased towards self learners.
  • Increase the percentage of answered questions even more. Here is the list of unanswered questions. I admit that some are hard, but there are a few that are answerable with a bit of research.

Note that the 0.9 questions per day in Anthony Pham's snapshot is just that: a snapshot. This number is high compared to the average number over the last few months (1 March – today), which was closer to 0.6 questions per day.

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