Helmetcase, I first want to say that I am in no way trying to attack you or your site, I manage my own site and I know how personal one's pride can be in their creation, however, having sad that:
Yeah, riiiiiight, the 10,000 hits a month I'm averaging are all just morbid curiousity, and my regular readership all think just like you.
There is no way that those hits are unique visitors, period. If you want to prove otherwise, provide a snapshot of your log files instead of relying on some simple counter mechanism.
Your site went live in on October 22, 2005 (at least the forums portion did) while your articles section on the front end appear to start on December 5th. Your counter that you have displayed shows a count currently of 58150 (15 of which I just added simply by refreshing your page which shows that your count only counts a page hit and not a visitor). In one 5 minute web session, just reading 4-5 of your articles and reading or posting comments on them, I could generate 8-10 hits alone (web sessions commonly generate double digit hits per user when you only track the times a page is requested instead of tracking by unique IP addresses) so your count certainly does not correlate to a large readership base as you seem to want to suggest. Feel free to prove me wrong with a log snapshot.
Your forums, having been live for about 6 months, have only 61 registered users and 842 posts:
30 of your registered users have zero posts, that's nearly half of your entire membership.
Only 17 of your users have more than 6 posts (27.87%)
0% of your users average even 1 post per day (you are the forum's most prolific poster weighing in a 0.98 posts per day).
The most users you have had on your forums at one time was 7 users.
How exactly does this correlate to your wild claim that there are "
a bunch" of you out there?
By comparison:
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My site (
www.neardeathexperiments.com)
My forums currently generate an average of 64,000 hits per month; it officially went live on March 15th of this year. My forums discuss SHTF and survival. Does this suggest that there are 6.4 times as many gun owners interested in SHTF discussion as there are liberal gun owners?
I have 176 members (nearly
3 times as many as you have in
less than half the time online). Does this suggest that there are 3 times as many gun owners interested in SHTF discussion as there are liberal gun owners?
We have 4569 posts (
over 5.4 times as many as your forums have) in 427 topics alone (for every
1 post your site gets in any discussion thread, mine gets
1.97 entirely new discussion threads). Does this suggest that there are
5.4 times as many gun owners interested in SHTF discussion as there are liberal gun owners?
The
most users we have ever had online was 54, our monthly
average "maximum members on at one time" count is 21 users (our
average is 3 times as many as
your most). Does this suggest that there are 3 times as many gun owners interested in SHTF discussion as there are liberal gun owners?
According to my log files and analysis tools, I have an approximate 3,936 unique visitors (after using the software to track multiple IP's to the same users and figuring in for unique hits from the same person using multiple computers) and given the trends in the data I have shown so far, I would be surprised to learn that PGP has a 5th of that number. You'll likely find that the bulk of your traffic in regards to your "hit counter" follows the same pattern as your forums do, a small minority is responsible for the bulk of the page requests.
The facts are, your site is not all that popular (though I do wish you luck), your liberal politicians comprise the majority of the anti-gun political base (and the majority of your elected reps are anti-gun as well) and the majority of the anti-gun folks encountered in most places are liberals. Check all of the anti-gun or liberal forums on the Internet or go to any liberal or anti-gun gathering place out in the real world, take a few surveys, my claims will pan out because that's the way the numbers fall.
You are quite possibly the poorest excuse for a THR member I've come across in the last six months. If I were a moderator, you'd be gone.
Petty.