Welcome, New Users, to The Daily Kos. This Diary is intended to help you orient yourself to the site and ask questions about how to use it.
In the Body you will find some links intended to get you participating more effectively. Also in the Body this week is a discussion of Traffic.
After that you can ask me any question you want. I don't know all the answers so if you stump me, you do. I invite those wiser than I to contribute and correct (or raise a ruckus, just don't scare people).
No permission slips needed, join us at the deep end of the pool for adult swim.
Hello Devil. Welcome to Hell.
If your user id (hover your mouse over your name in any comment, look at the status bar in the bottom of your browser) is larger than 197986 you probably haven't had the opportunity to participate in one of my Welcome New Users diaries.
That would be 760 of you more or less.
There are 13 of them that I consider the New Users Guide and I encourage you to take a look at the table of contents at least so you can see what kind of information is already available.
But don't panic, I'm always happy to review.
Three Weeks of Traffic
A number of regular users, myself included, had trouble maintaining our customary vigilence over every single diary every single day during this months rise in traffic. I had trouble during the 1000+ diary days until I revised and expanded my Window of Time.
- The Expanded Window of Time
That's 1200 Diaries. An entire day's worth even in the worst traffic. Should you have need to reference all the diaries from a particular day you should use an sid search.
I suggest you bookmark them all, but they can be a pain in the ass to open all at once if your memory is limited. I recommend instead that you keep another folder adjusted for daily traffic and use that for practical applications.
How many is that ek?
There are more sophisticated measures of traffic, but for simplicity's sake we'll use 3 gathered by jotter and one by me. I've recorded the traffic for the last 3 weeks, including Election Day in the table below.
- #Diary == Number of Diaries
- #UViews == Number of Unique User Views (logged in members who visit at least once)
- #Active == Number of Active Users (Diary, Diary Recommend, or Comment)
- #Comments == Number of Comments from sid searches (click the link, the numbers may jump around as the indexes settle)
The proper comparison is week to week, but I just wasn't able to squeeze it in three across so you'll have to use your imagination.
Diary streams of 300 - 400 are extremely easy to read even if you only visit for a half an hour or an hour 3 times a day.
Once in the morning. This need not take long, there are seldom more than 50 new diaries before 9 am and most days you'll see some from around midnight just disappearing (all times Eastern btw). How many of them do you think you will want to read? How much time do you have? You can read them all if you chose to.
Between 9 am and 5 pm your diary will drop like a stone. Some will vanish in less than an hour. I usually check in at lunch to see if the Rec List has changed, most days the last thing I read in the morning will have scrolled off, but not always.
Afternoons if you check in, content changes all the time, dinner is relatively slow and then things pick up some until about midnight. If you're watching TV anyway, why not blog? If you like to see only the most recent diaries use this search for the last three hours.
What I notice is that since Thursday the 6th the values for #Diary and #Active are not very different from a baseline sample I took in March of 07 and published in May that year. Values of 500 - 600 are not at all out of line with some unpublished data I gathered later, closer to primary season but still before it; and still easily readable by any person who takes the time to learn the site and is not a complete n00b (regardless of their UID).
This site crawls. There are tumbleweeds in the streets.
My point is pretty simple but I'll make it again.
It is not necessary to rudely proclaim "Not a Diary- Please Delete" or "Duplicate Diary- Please Delete" due to fear of pushing something worthy off the page.
If you think the offender is educable you might politely point him to one of my numerous diaries on the subject, even some of the ruder ones like Not a diary. and Not a diary 2.
If you think an offender is not educable and they are a persistent violator you might try complaining to the management, but they rarely act except in cases that are damaging to the site- copyright violations, spamming, hate speech and racism.
If you feel compelled to make a point why make it more than once unless you're being deliberately belligerent? There are other diaries including the one that just disappeared and I'm sure the author would just love your comments and recommendations. It's on page 2 of The Window of Time.
Otherwise you're simply annoying the rest of us who know the rules and follow them. Please educate yourself.