Partially, I'm trying to figure out whether the change in website and forum domain name has any lingering effects. To that end, I have been comparing the last two December stats, the 2014 was the last full month at the old address and the 2015 came after 10+ month of ramp-up time at the new subdomain location.
At first glance, the statistics look like we lost between 2/3 and 1/2 of the traffic, and that permanently. However, this is apples to oranges, as any links and visits to the class association (daysailer.org) now go to a different provider.
We also had remnants of some search-engine spam, that might have lead to some traffic that we didn't care about. A check of the search index at google shows that we are now clean - all the "viagra" related index entries are now gone and we are strictly sailboats now. (Except for the few posts that do mention the little blue pills in passing
).Stepping back from the overall statistics, some trends emerge. We had a number of additional hits to the page that opens up when people edit a post. So there should be many extra posts per month. That means that the active participants have all found their way to the new location and if we lost anyone in transit, we've made up for that by new people.
The amount of time spent on the site per visitor has increased - especially in the more extended time windows (> 1min) . Looks like we get fewer hits of the "let's check out this link" category, with immediate exits. Hard to tell whether that merely reflects that the new location is just the forum and no longer has the DSA main entry point.
The forum itself appears to not be linked from many sites; that's natural, perhaps, because the links usually were to the main DSA site, and those links no longer show up. There still are an annoying number of links from random Russian domains; perhaps they are a holdover from the days where we had the search engine spam. However, if any of you frequent other forums or FB groups - by all means go and put a link there to the forum here.
Curiously, the stats do not show any forwarding from the main daysailer site. I suspect that it may have to do with the main site being seen as "internal", because our location, while hosted by a different ISP, is just a subdomain of daysailer.org.
One thing where we are not comparing apples and oranges is access to the gallery on the forum. Apparently there are significant differences in the number of accesses to the gallery images relative to forum posts. If I remember correctly, gallery image accesses have become fewer in terms of percentages of pages visited. This is curious, and could be due to search engines not serving as many search results on our images than they used to. By being on a different domain from the main site, we may no longer have the same "weight". Hard to tell.
Feel free to share links to our images on other sites (where appropriate); and or to the forum itself: http://forum.daysailer.org/forum. That way we make sure that people interested in the DS will find this resource when they need it.