By the Numbers: Data Dump - July 2012

Wake up, wake up. It's the 1st of tha month! Time for another set of blue bars to look at. If you were a fan of these in the past and somehow missed last month, just know that I don't access to some of the analytics that Ethan did. That means I can't tell you who had the most visited profile pages or most visited blog pages. If I do get access to that, I'll definitely let you all know.

June's numbers were affected across the site by E3 2012. July was a slow month in terms of games, but we did have the Steam Summer Sale to boost some activity around here.

And don't forget you can click on the graphs to embiggen™ them.

Blogs

The number of blogs posted on the site per day is kind of all over the place. You can't really even pin it down to weekdays vs. weekends.

Fellow moderator, @mracoon , has been on a tear with his Video Game Music of the Day blogs. And, if you're a fan of beer, you should really check @Brewmaster_Andy 's Brewcasts featuring Tested.com's Joey Fameli.

Forums

Only two of the most commented topics of July were related to games. That's what happens when no games come out. All I can say is that I really hope games start coming out soon.

Also worth noting, if there's four things that Giant Bomb users love, it's:

• Cheap games
• Wrestling
• Anime
• @patrickklepek

No surprise here. @Video_Game_King easily takes the top spot with the most posts once again by just barely missing 200 posts.

Well, Patrick took the top spot here due to news posts, so that makes @falserelic the most active user in terms of creating topics.

Forum activity seems to bottom out on the weekends, which is kinda weird to me. Maybe that will change now that school is starting up again. I'm guessing people have had a lot of free time during the week lately. They certainly haven't been playing new games.

And the commenting activity pretty much mirrors the creation activity for the most part.

Reviews

Low numbers across the board here on the user reviews front. We're almost out of the desert, guys. I promise. There will be new games soon. We're almost there!

I don't really know who @theuselessgod or @King9999 are, but they're carrying the whole community in terms of reviewing games it seems.

I don't know what the hell happened on July 5th, but apparently someone went buck wild on reviewing games that day.

Videos

What if I were to tell you the most viewed, and therefore most popular, video on Giant Bomb during the month of July was Ryan and Vinny bouncing on a trampoline? Yeah...that sounds about right.

So, @MeatSim posted on videos 98 times in July, and if my investigations are correct, he still doesn't have the "First!" quest completed. You'll get it soon, buddy!

Wiki

3400+ individual edits? I have no idea what that guy's doing. Might have to look into that...

Always interesting to see new names at the top of highest points earned list.

These are the top 10 pages in terms of number of edits made, not points. How did FF7 jump into the top 10? And that seems like a ridiculous amount of edits for the Cerebrate page.

And here's the top 10 game pages in terms of points earned. Some weird stuff on the list this month. All comes back to being in the depths of the Summer drought I think.

Here's a breakdown of edits per day shown by category. That's a pretty big spike in the middle of the month for game pages.

Moderator business over here. I'm pretty sure that spike in rejections was when I ran into some users trying to add games to franchises incorrectly. But, for the most part, you can see here that we don't have to reject many submissions at all. Some days none at all.

ZombiePie once again squashed the submission queue. Every time I go in there, it's practically empty. It's been fairly slow the last few months. I kinda miss the days when we'd chug through 200+ submissions a day. You guys should do something about that. Get on that. Give us something to do.

Just a heads up...Next month's edition will be several days late, because I will be at PAX Prime 2012.

Again, with the @replying blogs to me. I'd complain, but, well, I'm here, aren't I?

One shy of 200? I need to fix that. Hopefully, I have a negative blog tucked away somewhere for this month.

Mmmmmmm. Graphs. Delicious graphs of data.

7 blogs this month? Sounds about right. I do tend to get carried away with those Brief Jaunts.

Hooray for Data Dumps. The most watched videos thing is news the Bomb guys can use, too.

I wonder if that FF7 threadnaught I made got people onto the wiki.

Never thought I'd see myself in here. Eighth most wiki points in July, huh?

I can't believe all those dumb comments I made got me a gold and silver medal. Also according to my completed quest list I got the "First!" quest done around E3 2011.

Great job, everyone! I didn't expect to see myself in the top ten wiki editors since I work more in Anime Vice and other Wikia communities.

Edit:

On second thought, I think I got in by a fluke.

Mmm tasty stats. Thx for sharing man!

Nice song ref @Marino . Bone Thugs was dope. Cleveland represent!

Well of course a ton of people reviewed games on July 5th. How else do you sober up when you're hung over from 4th of July parties? Duh!

Also this is the second month in a row where I feel like my post count is underrepresented. I hereby demand an official review! This fight is fixed, I tell ya! Although I guess I could be happy I'm not posting quite as much as I think. I don't have nearly enough quality insights to justify posting so much.

And am I the only one here frightened to death of the Wiki's and anything related to them? I'll make use of them, sure, taking full advantage of other peoples work. But I refuse to edit them in any way, myself. What could I possibly change?

I will occasionally click the Mod images thingy every now and again, but I always see the first image then freeze up. I start to talk to the image, eventually I'll just scream things at it, like "What do you want from me?" I look at that "I approve of these edits" button and ask myself "Who am I to hold such power?" Well I'm no one, I tell you. No one!

anime and wrestling are two great tastes that taste great together, everyone knows this.

Nice work.

The best way to get the first quest is to have no life like me. I think I have gotten it 3 or more times so far.

@Marino I'm curious to know how the number of blogs being posted has changed over the past 2 or 3 years. I have a suspiscion there may have been a decrease at some stage but I'd like to be shown to be wrong if that isn't the case. If you're able to draw up any stats on that then I'd be very interested. Maybe take an average over a month or 3 month period and then compare year for year?

"the most viewed, and therefore most popular, video on Giant Bomb during the month of July was Ryan and Vinny bouncing on a trampoline" I have heard of no such things. Missing this piece of content is a blasphemy of the highest order, and I will have to seek it out.

@RagingLion@Marino : I'd love to see all of these graphs spread over the history of the site. It would be fascinating to see how the site has grown and how the communities behaviour and use of the site has changed over the years.

@Mento said:

The most watched videos thing is news the Bomb guys can use, too.

I pull this data from the same system they use, so I'm sure they're well aware of all kinds of site traffic data that I can't even see.

@Daveyo520 said:

The best way to get the first quest is to have no life like me. I think I have gotten it 3 or more times so far.

Or hang out on the site during E3. I personally gave people over 100 shots at it over the course of three days.

@RagingLion said:

Maybe take an average over a month or 3 month period and then compare year for year?

That's possible. The largest window of stats I can pull at any given time is a calendar year, so I can't do one giant one for the entire history. But, doing what you suggest is doable. I did one a couple weeks ago looking back at the first week/month of the site being up in 2008. Those numbers are highly inflated though due to everyone being so active when the site went live. So, comparing those numbers to this month isn't really fair.

I'll just skim over them and nod my head. "Yes, yes this looks in order"

I like how whenever there's an unexplained spike in activity anywhere in the site, the eyes of the mods collectively narrow in suspicion....

T___T

Once again thanks for writing this up. The one questionable thing that sticks out for me is that a a lot of the top users on the list for posting the most user reviews are just copying and pasting them from their personal sites and blogs.....

@ZombiePie said:

Once again thanks for writing this up. The one questionable thing that sticks out for me is that a a lot of the top users on the list for posting the most user reviews are just copying and pasting them from their personal sites and blogs.....

As long as they wrote them themselves, I don't have a problem with that. All but one of the reviews I have on the site were written by me for a different site back in 2003-2005.

Pretty sure it's a conspiracy that I've never been on one of these.

@Crelio said:

I'll just skim over them and nod my head. "Yes, yes this looks in order"

The longer you stick around, the more these charts will become fascinating.

Oh yeah, there's my first-of-the-month data porn.

Hey I'm the third top user at making topics!

@SexyToad said:

Hey I'm the third top user at making topics!

I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. @Sweep 's got his eye on you!

I read the chart I feel so proud almighty me baby, now I feel like dancing.

@falserelic: Such an accomplishment.

Wow, I make a lot of threads don't I? >_>

More posts should start with Bone Thugs references. Also yay wrestling.

Wrestling number 2? Delightful! Now if it can just reach number 1 status!

I find these charts and graphs fascinating though. Kind of makes me want to try and do something to get on them. If I can work something out, I may actually do a blog a day during September, been contemplating a "gods in gaming month" but I fear I don't have 30 games that I've actually played that have gods in them. I may have about 16 or 17, but not 30, and definitely not 30 where gods feel like they play an important enough of a difference from another game (after all, how many games could I write a blog about where an evil god tries to take over the world in a non-interesting way? Or that you're the 'tool' of a god, or multiple gods, to accomplish something because the gods are too lazy to do it themselves?) So I may have to fiddle with that some. We'll see if I have it ready in time for September or not.

The wrestling thread is #2 for the second straight month?

It can't be....

It's not possible....

I don't believe it....

No....

No.

NO! NO! NO!

There's a video of Ryan and Vinny jumping on trampolines? Why have I not seen this?

@Animasta said:

anime and wrestling are two great tastes that taste great together, everyone knows this.