h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A lot of this kinds of stat-stuff is usually handled by the Server, upon request by the clients, and is mostly used to determine site-traffic. H2g2 doesn't really have a burning need for that kind of traffic-tracking because it's not commercially-based. Putting that kind of material on a page really just clogs up a page with irrelevant material that only a few people would want to see, anyway.

(The surest sign of a newbie-designed/poorly-designed web site is a clock, registering hits, displayed prominently on the front page.)

One of the oldest myths about the Web is the frequency of 'hits'. Each hit is simply a page being loaded. Has no bearing on whether a user has read the page, used it to link somewhere else or interacted with it in any way. This is important, again, for advertisers on the site.....which leads to the real issue for a commercial-situation: stickiness.

H2g2 has built-in stickiness; there's no need to make each page deliberately so.

I'd prefer to have some intelligent, interesting articles on topics of interest to wade through than a whole heap of dull statistics. If the writers are talented, even some unintersting articles can be made to sparkle and attract attention.

Fruitbat

I think I agree with the Fruitbat, and I'm glad to see this thread wake up after so many months. There's no point drooling over simple numbers (pace Myth of 42), so I wonder whether we really want to know who has contributed the most bytes of inspirational drivel over the last 24 hours.

My point since May (at least) has been to select threads which are showing a bit of action (more than five actual responses in 24 hours, perhaps).

Please correct me if I've missed something, but the site as it is can point me at

* random things that are going on at the moment (latest or biggest messages)

* things I know I want to be interested in (search for a subject...)

Who's online? is one way of looking for activity. The other way, which is what I'm interested in is "where's the action?". Where are the arguments? Some of the response hot-spots are ephemeral, chat-style interactions. Some may be deep discussions. Either might be interesting to researcher X, so you should be able to request a random or parameter-driven selection from them.

You can see 'where the action is' by going to http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/info : there you'll find links to the 20 latest postings, and the 20 researchers with the most / with the biggest postings!

I don't really want to know the 20 latest postings (I go there, and it can be interesting, but it can also be a transient shoal of red herrings).

I certainly don't want to know who's contributing the biggest buckets of ascii to the greatest number of conversations (again, several of these people I come across, but that's when I'm interested in what they're taking about).

I want to be able to ask for a selection of conversations/articles/requests for peer review... that have had a lot of responses in the last 24 hours. Or maybe a selection of the same objects which have seen a flurry of activity in the last week or month even if it's died down now.

Okay, I see your point.

But I have to object against the 'peer review...24 hours' point. First, you can see which threads recently have received comments by clicking on the advert banner and selecting 'more conversations' (or surfing directly to /guide/F48874 ). Second, why 24 hours? PR is different from Askh2g2 (for example). There's no such thing as a 'closed' topic in PR and if a thread has gone to sleep for three weeks then this only means that the originator of the thread has been *waiting* for three weeks now. This misconception is fairly common, I'm afraid. For this very reason there will be features like a random sort order presentation for PR threads in the future. You're sincerely invited to dig out and float up as many 'sleeping' threads as you want!