TalkPhysics posts week-by-week, and a problem

TalkPhysics has felt relatively quiet in the last few weeks. This prompted me to look into it in more detail.

There is a lot of fluctation week-to-week in TalkPhysics posts (I show the full data set at the bottom of this post, in case anyone wants to analyse it themselves!), so I plotted a five-week moving average, and calculated the standard error for this 5-week sample to give some sort of confidence interval.

On 7 October 2012 our decision to turn on the outgoing email server from TalkPhysics’s development site caused many TalkPhysics users to receive a series of unexpected, nonsense emails, for which I apologise. I’ve shown above the week in which that occurred.

It looks likely to me that there has been a significant decline in posts since that date. It’s possible there was a fluke beforehand: maybe there was an unusually large number of posts just before and now it is just regressing to the norm, but it seems more likely that we’d had a trend of increasing use and that trend has been reversed. It looks likely to me that our accidental “spamming” of TalkPhysics users has deterred them.

I shall be in touch with a few of those users affected to ask their opinions and see whether there is anything we can do to stimulate use of the site again. We’re in discussion with a preferred supplier for a new version of TalkPhysics based on Drupal software (rather than Elgg) and obviously we will be more careful controlling outgoing emails in the future.

Raw data:

 

 

Period start	Posts per week
2010-04-19	48
2010-04-26	41
2010-05-03	21
2010-05-10	26
2010-05-17	40
2010-05-24	79
2010-05-31	16
2010-06-07	80
2010-06-14	46
2010-06-21	74
2010-06-28	66
2010-07-05	52
2010-07-12	105
2010-07-19	34
2010-07-26	13
2010-08-02	4
2010-08-09	10
2010-08-16	21
2010-08-23	17
2010-08-30	27
2010-09-06	25
2010-09-13	83
2010-09-20	51
2010-09-27	61
2010-10-04	19
2010-10-11	49
2010-10-18	57
2010-10-25	76
2010-11-01	42
2010-11-08	55
2010-11-15	40
2010-11-22	44
2010-11-29	62
2010-12-06	83
2010-12-13	124
2010-12-20	80
2010-12-27	46
2011-01-03	90
2011-01-10	107
2011-01-17	107
2011-01-24	84
2011-01-31	90
2011-02-07	193
2011-02-14	108
2011-02-21	71
2011-02-28	114
2011-03-07	69
2011-03-14	43
2011-03-21	41
2011-03-28	98
2011-04-04	57
2011-04-11	50
2011-04-18	47
2011-04-25	40
2011-05-02	55
2011-05-09	102
2011-05-16	64
2011-05-23	87
2011-05-30	55
2011-06-06	85
2011-06-13	75
2011-06-20	86
2011-06-27	101
2011-07-04	82
2011-08-29	67
2011-09-05	124
2011-09-12	74
2011-09-19	107
2011-09-26	176
2011-10-03	150
2011-10-10	69
2011-10-17	77
2011-10-24	101
2011-10-31	67
2011-11-07	49
2011-11-14	77
2011-11-21	38

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