@IsaacMoses I like it!

I noticed something in our site analytics today:

@MonicaCellio Thanks!

New visits, visits (new or not), and -- as a consequence, I presume -- views peaked in a major way on the day before Yom Kippur. How much of that is from Days of Awe - Mi Yodeya?, how much from Google, and how much from other sources is unknown.

I'm going to guess that our book contributed, though, because this is last fall:

(I haven't actually looked up the date of Yom Kippur 5775; what I'm noting is the absence of a major spike.)

Here's this year again with the distracting page-views line omitted -- the difference really pops out here:

@MonicaCellio If you look at it weekly, you'll see such spikes around then in the previous two years, more so in 2013, but not as big. I think that 1) Lots of Jews do more Jewing on the Internet before YK, and 2) DoA-MY did move the needle, on top of that.

@IsaacMoses that's a good point about looking at weekly stats. I would expect (but haven't checked) Jews 'doing more Jewing on the Internet" for both HHD and Pesach. But our HHD spike does seem to be bigger this year, and we changed one thing... (Who, me? Reasoning from one data point? :-) )

@MonicaCellio Actually, now that we have released four publications around different holidays, and been in business for six years (just got my Yearling badge!), it should be possible to run a regression that points at separate holiday and publication effects.

@IsaacMoses oh, we do have data that far back! Nice. I hadn't previously looked to see how much we had.

I don't know anything about running regressions, so I'll leave that to others, but the question of the effects of our publications on traffic (including any echoes in future years, for the older ones) is interesting to me.

@MonicaCellio Well, actually, the data doesn't include m.y 1.0, so we only have 4.5 years' worth.

This past Rosh Chodesh Adar was our biggest spike ever, by far, for most of our metrics, including Page Views. This past EY"K was the biggest, by far, for Visits and New Visits. So, I think it's fair to say that DoA-MY drove a great deal of new traffic, while the opening of PTIJ season this past year drove crazy amounts of in-community traffic.

@IsaacMoses PTIJ this past year did take off at a run.

@MonicaCellio Incidentally, this probably ought to be resolved definitively between now and PTIJ season this year, which is in about 3 months:

@IsaacMoses For what it's worth, I can't find any similar pattern on Christianity surrounding their festivals, but Ramadan is clearly visible on Islam. I suspect people need to look up the customs for when they need to prepare for occasional celebrations. The main thing Christians need to know is where their church is.

I'm so thrilled you all have a publication wing, by the way. I wish other sites would take up that idea.

@JonEricson Interesting. Are there no widespread Christian holiday practices with rules?

@JonEricson Thanks! Part of the motivation here is that during many of our holidays, using computers is forbidden, so making something paper-ready is the best way to get people reading our stuff then.

@JonEricson Some other sites have blogs and podcasts, which I gather (not being very familiar) are in many cases producing great original content (outside of the base Q&A)

@JonEricson thanks! If folks from any other sites want to talk with us about our experience, they're welcome to do so. Depending on what they want to know, this chat room or meta are probably the best venues.

... I propose that after Chanuka, we do a Meta post asking for concrete proposed updates to the PTIJ policy, let it collect answers and votes for some time, and then leave it to the mod team to decide how to edit the Policy FAQ-post.

@IsaacMoses Well, there is stuff like Lent, which has dietary rules. But every Christian sect abides by different rules. Generally though the rules are less important than the attitude.

@IsaacMoses oh, I just added an answer to the question you linked in here, before seeing this comment.

@MonicaCellio ... Or that :)

@JonEricson And when I tried to apply a rules-of-behavior mentality like on Mi Yodeya to Christianity, my question got closed. :-) (To be fair, I asked another question along those lines, and that one did not get closed.)

@msh210 Heh. I remember the second. ;-)

@JonEricson maybe by running the data mentioned above and writing up something like this meta.stackexchange.com/q/240634/166155 you could influence that.

Can anyone compose a tag wiki for meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/tags/policy/info ? I'm not sure what it's use is exactly.

@DoubleAA I think that that tag started as site-policy on mi.yodeya 1.0, before there was a Mi Yodeya Meta.

... so it probably originally meant something like "meta," generally, which could be why it's unfocused now, within the context of a whole Meta site. (Though I think we also had a meta.)