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Looking at the stats on the area51 page for music.SE, I first had the impression it was doing pretty well. Today I found out that the Startup Business SE was closed, looking at it's stats, it has very similar results to music.SE, even a little better in some areas.

                        Music.SE (972 days) | Startup business (1176 days)
questions per day:            3.9                 4.9
% answered:                    99                  98
avid users:                   377                 749
total users:                 5,378               18,139
answer ratio:                 2.8                 3.1
visits per day:              7,317               2,778

Yes, we do get much more visits, but we're also a much smaller community. If we multiply the number of users by the number of visits, Music.SE gets 39,350,826 user.visits and Startup business SE get 50,390,142 user.visits; still better than Music.SE. Don't ask me why I invented such a metric, I just think if you need to combine the number of visits and the number of users in a single metric it makes more sense to multiply them rather than add them together. Anyway, should we be worried about the future of Music.SE?

There are plenty of question about how to improve this site, so please let's just keep it about the results on area51 and the fate of Music.SE.

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  • I have changed your question title from its unnecessarily over-pessimistic wording.
    – Doktor Mayhem Mod
    Dec 24, 2013 at 16:07

1 Answer 1

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You have seen this question, right: Vote to close this forum

The stats you don't see include rate of change over time of visits, new visitors etc and these can have a significant indication as to whether a site is doing well or not.

I agree that our main task is to get more questions, and we have a number of good ideas that people are tackling - and you can help here as well.

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  • Well, there's only 200 days of difference between the two stats, so you'd assume they were growing at similar rates (on average). I also remember getting more question per day a few month ago, maybe it's just me, but there seems to be less activity recently.
    – Anthony
    Dec 24, 2013 at 23:15
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    No. There are loads of differences - you have so many ways to cut the statistics. And as for December, traffic drops every year on all the sites I moderate. It's normal.
    – Doktor Mayhem Mod
    Dec 24, 2013 at 23:53
  • I am a bit puzzled: who actually makes the decision to close a forum? IMHO any forum with > 90% questions answered and a greater than 2:1 answer ratio, including business startup SE, wouldn't deserve a closure. Or was there any other reason for closing that forum, eg. Too many low quality answers, etc?
    – mey
    Jan 28, 2015 at 19:13
  • Mey - SE could close any of their sites. In reality, if a beta site isn't growing fast enough then it is likely to get closed. They have a wide range of measures that a site needs to meet, otherwise it doesn't make sense. If you search on meta.stackexchange.com this has been discussed many times. It is not what comments are designed for. Use the search over there.
    – Doktor Mayhem Mod
    Jan 28, 2015 at 19:20
  • Thanks @DrMayhem and i apologise for all the inconvenience. I just found out that music SE is graduating, so congratulations! Very glad to hear that. ☺
    – mey
    Jan 30, 2015 at 19:00

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