A few people have asked about traffic and I wanted to give a quick update on site activity. The site re-launched on March 26th of this year and all data goes through yesterday, June 21st. Some of these numbers might not look that impressive but keep in mind that for 11 days in early May, we lost the NSBB domain. Two of those days had zero traffic and nine more had roughly 50% normal traffic while we fought to regain control of the primary domain from an unresponsive domain registrar.

Overall, things are going pretty well in my eyes. Losing those 10+ days kinda knee-capped us in the short-term but we're not in this for the short-term. We lost some really vital SEO priority, regular direct traffic, and social influence that will take time to rebuild. We're still not quite back to where we were just before the domain went FUBAR for those ten days but that will right itself over time if we just keep plugging along.

Anyway, some numbers. We will be comparing the same time period (Mar 26-June 21) for 2023 and 2022.

We've seen a significant uptick in users thanks to our outreach with social media, search engine optimization, and use of content aggregators. That has led to a +49.6% growth in users and a +55.4% growth in new user visits.

Our registrations are lower than I'd like to see but we've seen 32 new registrations to the site compared to only 12 over the same period last year.

Forum content has been really promising, especially factoring in those lost days of traffic. During that period of time we've seen 11,929 posts created in the forums compared to 10,976 posts over the same period of time last year.

One of the ways this is happening is changing up how game threads are handled. I hope to return to letting users create them in the future but I need to figure out a better way to manage those before we can do that. It's wayyyyyyy easier for me to create the thread every morning than juggling who has today's thread and making sure it gets on the site in a timely fashion. Don't worry, this isn't permanent, I just need a little head space to re-evaluate how to manage it under the old "rules".

Anyway, already in 2023 we've seen 30 game threads go over 50 replies. In the entire 2022 season, that happened only ten times. The new system is attracting a lot more commentary, we just need to work in the old flavor while maintaining that uptick in posting.

That's about all I have right now! Thanks again to everyone who has helped me navigate all the bumps and bruises of the transition and if you ever have input on how to change or improve things, my door is always open!