peterot wrote:
Here is a bit of data from alexa.com - Slowtwitch sure aint growing. I am sure the censorship and forum manipulation will help with that. Industry will be happy but there wont be anyone on the site so they will pull their ads. anyway.
Alexa - like most traffic algorithms - has its very serious limitations, especially since we don't participate by using any of the big internet tracking tools - like reselling doubleclick ads. We serve every ad in house. We actually took a reasonably big hit in the short term when we gave up on give ad space to a reseller, but we didn't really like that they wouldn't abide by our ad rules strictly - no screen takeovers, no expansion ads, no sound, etc - and even had some concern about the tracking of web usage that goes on with stuff like doubleclick. So we decided to go 100% in house with our ads. But that's (part of) why Alexa data isn't going to be particularly accurate for our site. We've actually struggled with that internally, because people use sites like Alexa to evaluate sites. It would actually look better for our business to give up some of our control and make our data more public, but we're not really comfortable with that, so we don't. The only cookies that come from this site are from this forum. And whatever google analytics uses (we do need some tools). And, if you make use of the twitter/facebook share buttons or facebook comments - voluntarily of course - that gets tracked by those entities (but not by us).
Slowtwitch actually is growing quite a bit. Obviously there are a bunch of different metrics - pageviews, pages per visit, unique visitors, time on site, etc. - you can use, but on average, we're up between 15-25% on all metrics vs. a year ago.
PS: your best bet if you want to share Alexa data is to do a screen grab and post it to Tinypic. You can push the "preview post" button to see that what you did in attempting to post the Alexa data didn't actually work. Just FYI.
What I really don't understand is what you are so angry about with all this. How we run our forum clearly irritates you. And I don't really understand why. I can understand it with regards to something like Stockhouse, for the reasons I mentioned. There's money on the line. Plus the issue of censoring information leading to some sort of positional bias. But the purpose of Stockhouse is, supposedly anyway, to give/share information that is used for financial gain. Even if the stated purpose of this forum was to share information that was intended to lead to triathlon "gain" - it's not; I don't even know if we really have a stated purpose for this forum - what is the real harm that comes to you as a result of that? I.e., if someone censors Stockhouse, you could maybe say that you lost money. But if we censor some post about triathlete potentially cheating at Chicago, what is the net negative of that to you? Are we somehow taking seconds off your potential PR by censoring anonymous accusations against some random age-grouper? I guess that's what's really so mysterious about your diatribe. Why does this piss you off so much? Slowtwitch isn't Stockhouse. It's not going to be. This to a significant degree (though not entirely) because - thankfully - triathlon isn't finance. But what I don't understand is in what way that actually materially damages your triathlon experience.
As a personal aside unrelated to how I/we moderate, I think you're an asshole for slamming me for trying to give a thoughtful reply to your post, especially after you came onto a thread and asked me very probative questions about my personal finances - because, as you justified it, I said, "ask me ANYTHING." (which conveniently ignores the fact that I said "...about the Ironman US Championships" right after). That was a question which I answered in a pretty open and - it seemed by your reply to my response - helpful way. Reading your posts on this thread, you sound like a spoiled child who can't get what he wants, which - based on your reply to Murphy's Law that stated that you had a BC pension - you are not. For a guy that's old enough to earn a pension, you seriously need to grow up.
"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp
