1:43 PM
@NautArch OK, I stopped. I do have a nagging suspicion that we overvalue the importance of the what's new feed, though. Do some of the mods here have the ability to quantify how many people go to that page vs directly going to Q&As via sites like Google?
My feeling is that for example, for the people that spend a lot of time on the site here, OP may be a common abbreviation, but it really is not an abbeviation that has anything to do with RPGs. It is one that has to do with posting here. So it may be quite cryptic to a casual user who comes here via a search engine, and cleaning them up would help such users to have a better experience.
Likewise, I know that NaN is "Not a number", because I did a little python coding at some point in my life, and maybe there is a large overlap between programmers and people that play RPGs, but should we assume normal readers would know this?
I appreciate that the small group of people that are highly active here, come here daily, vote, edit, comment and answer questions are also important users of the site, and so their experience is important too, and if small harmless edits spoil it for them, then maybe better avoid them, but I worry that we are putting too much emphasis on how the site feels to us as heavy users, because that is our experience, vs on how the site feels to other users.
Probably a possible question for Meta. I'll just stop, instead.
Going by the site analytics I can see, we have about 300 votes per day, 5 questions per day, 10 answers per day, but 14,000 page views.
Only 4% direct links entering, vs 86% from search and 10% from referrers.
(Those being mostly other stack exchanges).
This, even with inexact numbers, suggest to me that the VAST majority of users are random RPG fans coming here via search engines, directly to a post instead of spending time on the site. If I assume each active user votes only once per visit, 98% of users are passive.
Maybe a better measure would be how many human-hours people spend on this site. When I was very active, I easily spend 2-3h a day here, if not more, anwering, editing, reading other answers etc. If all 300 do that, that would be 900 hours a day, and if somoene just checking in how wild shape works with rage spends only 5 mins, it would be not quite as disbalanced, then the occasionals only would out-use the actives by about 300 hours per day.