[drupal-devel] drupal.org stats and different users

[Nedjo Rogers]

Two thoughts on drupal.org stats:

1. I suspect our relatively disappointing stats are not unrelated to recent
discussions on what content we present to whom.  I'm thinking in particular
of the definable group "potential new drupal users", which will include most
firt-time drupal.org visitors as well as some repeat visitors.  Say we have
fifteen pages that answer the needs of this main group.  Their needs - and
therefore their content, ideally - should need to change very little--every
few weeks, I'd say.

As things stand, pretty well every page contains content that changes hourly
(the "active forum topics" block)--and that is of little interest to
potential new users.  True, we could address this partly by caching page
parts--but it would be much better not to show those parts to uninterested
users in the first place.

Also, it's apparently the case that few visits are from authenticated users.
But if authenticating gave you a whole new view of the site, catered to your
interests and needs, likely more of our registered users would take the step
of authenticating.

In short--doing a better job of presenting focused content to user groups
should have performance benefits as well as other payoffs.  Coding to make
this possible would start with user group specific filtering of content
views (blocks, home page, etc.).

2. Do we do any automatic revisiting/recaching of recently viewed/newly
added/popular content after cache flushes?  Might doing so help to preempt
many dynamic page loads?