How many people access this site per day?
How much feedback does this site get?
How long will it take to get an answer to my question?
Questions that have answers get answered quickly, always within several months. As you can see from the remaining questions that have gone without answers, some questions go begging for answers nearly forever.
This answer was written in 1997, so these statistics are historical. For more current data, see Number of Accesses to Webpages.
As always on the net, it is hard to know the true number of people that are accessing one's site. The main difficulty is that only accesses which reach my isp's server are counted, and more and more parts of the internet are caching pages to reduce net traffic.
For example, AOL grabs any site requested by one of their members and then keeps a copy of that site on AOL machines to satisfy further requests. I don't know the algorithm used to update their cached copy, except that in every 5-7 day period the overall ~schester site, which includes many more webpages than just the anf site, gets 50-100 accesses by AOL "proxy" machines. Hence AOL grabs my site at least weekly.
Everyone accessing my site from AOL counts as one person total in the entire interval between AOL updates. Since roughly half of everyone on the net is on AOL, this means that the number of people accessing my site is roughly twice the number of requests that znet sees, independent of the AOL update interval, as long as the interval is not more frequently than daily. (The update interval is not likely to be more frequent than daily, since I do not update my site on most days.)
Cable companies and Satellite-TV-ISP's also cache webpages so that they can download them much faster to their subscribers than would be the case if they grabbed them directly from the net each time. More and more companies are also caching pages to improve their net access.
As you might imagine, this situation is extremely frustrating to advertisers on the net....
On the other hand, there are a number of web "robots" that grab websites for various purposes that should not be counted among my site's visitors. Among them are:
- the various search engines, who need to grab all sites to index them,
- evil spammers, who go through webpages to grab email addresses for nefarious purposes, and
- academic researchers, who go through webpages to understand the structure and content of the web.
The number of robots per day for a given site can always be calibrated by examining the access numbers for the least-requested pages on that site. The number of robots per day will usually be less than those numbers, but not always, since some search engines more frequently update pages that have more links to them.
With that in mind, the following figure shows that my anf main page gets typically 20-35 web accesses per day, averaged over a week, which probably translates into >60 person accesses per day. The tables of hikes sorted by mileage and by number, as well as the table of contents for all my webpages ("tchester" in the plot), each get 5-10 web accesses per day.
In 1997, I received perhaps 6 messages a month on average total about this site, mostly questions, and perhaps 1-2 messages a month total from experts giving me information.
In 1999, I received an average of 534 messages, just under 2 messages a day on average, about the SGM sites, not counting my collaborator Jane Strong's messages. These messages came from 164 different people, and are among the most interesting emails that I receive out of my 50-100 per day.