Happy New Year 2019
 

Happy New Year to the handful of members who still come to this site!

:dancer:

Happy 2019 to you and your wife as well.

Happy New Year!! I'm back cleaning snake containers again. The dates changed but the work never ends. LOL.

I'm a new member, admittedly, but I do still come here almost every day.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Happy New Year!! I checked the Forum Statistics and im pretty much surprised that the most number of visitor was December 2018! It just means that people still visit this site!

Actually, no, that really can't be accurate at all. There is just no way at all that 4,683 REAL people came to this site on 12-12-2018. Perhaps some spambot went haywire or something. Or perhaps just some glitch in the message board software.

I've seen spikes like this on FaunaClassifieds as well. For instance it is now showing 11,689 visitors on 10-04-2016, which I can assure you never really happened.

Yep these weird spikes in traffic are happening to other reptile forums as well .. it's apparently a tool used by the site owners to add 'fake' traffic and members to greatly increase the value of the site .


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Well, that certainly isn't the case with my sites. I've never felt the need nor desire to try to fake statistics like that. I'm much more interested in the true picture they paint about what is going on.

Are a bunch of people trying to sell their sites? I would think the market is pretty soft for websites these days.

I understand they're popular for advertisers... so they're tempted by traffic /numbers ...

There was one reptile forum just a few months ago ( one that was struggling but was still bought out - by foreign owners )

Anyways who went through a phase .. starting fairly slowly


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I'm not allowed to edit for some reason ..

..continued ... went through a phase where the number of news threads and new MEMBERS steadily grew and grew until the new numbers were quite ridiculous.

A forum having about 30 posts a day was getting 300 posts per day and maybe 50 BRAND NEW members overnight - every night !

95% of the new threads were people having ridiculous issues and were clearly bogus threads .

Topics including arguing you didn't need stats for ceramics , snake and lizard cohabitation, feeding strange mammals to snakes , depressed geckos .. you try and think of something ridiculous and there was a new thread about if .



Anyways these new members and seemingly much traffic meant more and more advertisers ..


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Back when I started up FaunaTopSites.com, I would monitor the logs and found quite a few people cheating on the stats to try to get to the top of the list. It was pretty easy to tell from the IP addresses. Someone sitting at their keyboard just refreshing the screen over and over again to get the number of visits up in their stats. Actually had some kid admit to me he was doing that.

When you see a large number of TOTAL VIEWS and a small number of UNIQUE VIEWS with the IP address remaining the same for all the views, that is what someone is doing. Perhaps even doing it programmatically with long keystroke macros. However, when you see the opposite, with UNIQUE VIEWS and TOTAL VIEWS nearly the same, someone is using a sort of spam service with a random IP generator just to get the hits to their website. In that case, it is odd because obviously nearly "everyone" is coming to the site, but not even going beyond the first page they visit. I suppose now a lot of raw views are being generated by search engine spiders, so I'm not sure the stats even mean anything any longer.

Perhaps people are still cheating there. Beats me. Not worth my time and effort to monitor it any longer. And it certainly did not earn me any friends when I confronted people about their cheating. Seems that whenever you catch someone lying or cheating, YOU wind up being the bad guy in their eyes.

Well I think Facebook probably has attracted alot of people to post in Reptile Specific groups and that has affected forums like this. But, i have a soft spot for forums since these are more organized and can be reviewed/reread again unlike FB posts. I often advice newbies to always check the forums to have ideas on how to deal particular problems since they are already been handled by more senior hobbyists. I hope people will be back on forums.

Very true . Great points !


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Happy New Year!!

That's correct, FB has certainly attracted many people with their groups. I personally have joined 3 or 4 myself. Each one is basically the same and the bickering makes for some interesting reading. One guy was on there this week who has a huge king cobra and is looking for snakes to feed it. That post set off a few people..

FB will never match the true quality of a real forum like this.