Missing pages - can YOU help us track them down?

[JustineMumsnet]

So, ever since BigTech made his new releases (which incidentally still have a few wee glitches to sort, before you shout) we've noticed that folks are clicking less on all the Talk topic home pages eg this one. In fact you are collectively clicking on those roughly half as much as you used to and we're completely stymied as to why. Don't spose any bright spark out there has any ideas about what might have changed?

(There's a pack of Christmas cards (or three) by way of reward for anyone whose information leads to the discovery of our lost pages...)

roffle at all this lot

my page has weeny teeny writing on it too. And I'm long sighted, so ner

This whole 'www' or not thing is a complete red herring. The site has speeded up because the ad problem that was slowing it down has been fixed. Promise and everything. Go back to trying both and you'll see each are equally fast.

my geek dh said same, so I didn't try cutting out the red-herring-w's, site has speeded up considerably regardless.
Go on, you can tell us, whose advert was it

Justine and Big Tech,

sorry aobut your missing pages.

I'm still having trouble with 'search'.

When I search, it shows all the threads with terms that match my search, but when I click the thread I want it takes me to the first page of the topic, not to the thread I've requested.

It's driving me mad.....

Prolly irrelevant but...

...last week, when the Bombs went off in BigTech's cupboard, I posted that the thread links and topic links were As One on Active Convos. Since I sometimes use AC to find and click through to Topic lists, a proportion of my own MNing can be explained this way, and no doubt lots of other people's. It was rapidly corrected but this could explain the lack of clicks onto topic titles, no?

It will depend on what period you are looking at your analytics?

Or has this been said already?

Wilf I have no idea what this entire thread is about but I would like to let you know that I admired the nonchalant use of prolly in your post there

[Have you tried the Slendertone on yer face yet? ]

heh heh

tis deep within the recesses of the maw of death garage so nah

Everything takes so much more time since the changes, I get fed up when I've checked "Threads I'm on" I usedto check arts and crafts and some of the parenting threads, I can't be bothered now it all takes so much more time.

whomovedmychocolate I think you might be on to something with search - if you click on topic from search results page you get a talk topic number - rather than name - hmm will check that out with Techs...

ME IT WAS ME I SAID THAT IT WAS ME

I know where the missing pages are. They're gradually escaping through the rogue spaces on the page.

I did alert Big Tech to this issue, but all he did was laugh.

So I did tell you. Ner.

Yes Justine, send MP the cards I still have a drawerful of the fecking things

Actually, I did have a similar problem when I rolled out advanced search on another site - turned out to be a caching issue, to save time searches which had previously been run were reserved from the cache, and subsequent click throughs no counted.

IIRC it self corrected when the server had done all search permutations. But having no idea how you do search at mn I can't say if this is the prob.

DOH is that the prize? I don't really need the cards, I just want praise and admiration

or some of those short-dated biscuits

Thanks for all the feedback.

I'm afraid MP doesn't get the cards after all though, despite it being the best guess yet. It is true that "www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable" and "www.mumsnet.com/Talk/2724" both lead to the same place. And it might even be the case that due to recent changes that the numeric form of the link is being used. However, this doesn't account for the difference. The increase in use of the latter version of the URL is a few hundred, not the many thousands that have been lost.

It's definitely nothing to do with caching. It could be a measurement issue, but we've tested that and can find no evidence of it. We've already replaced the calls to Google Analytics with calls elsewhere and tracked them and we get precisely the right number, every single time.

I don't think it's that things take longer than they used to - the average time spent on the site hasn't changed. Nor have the number of visitors, or indeed, the number of unique page views.

It's not a function of something that has been changed then broken and fixed either. We have consistently seen it since the big changes a couple of weeks ago.

Any more guesses are welcome!

UM

is there any indication of pathways changing or can you not track in that much detail?

I am strangely drawn to this thread, though I have not a clue what you are talking about. 'Tis like listening to people speaking another language, one can enjoy the musical cadences of the words without understanding a fecking word....

e.g. if 90% of the visitrs came via the homepage, and now only 30% of them do, that would indicate where the change has occured

I wasn't saying quite the same thing as MP Yetmoretech.

However you say: "I don't think it's that things take longer than they used to - the average time spent on the site hasn't changed. "

I would take exception to this - given that it takes longer to load a page, if the average time spent on the site hasn't changed you should have an increase in the pages served (unless you are saying we've all become more ponderous (possibly we are old farts))?

Can I ask why it matters (is this an adserving target thing?) Or just idle curiousity?

give us the keys to the stats

we are highly competitive housewives, we will fight to find the answer to a question that we don't really care about. It's what we do

MP, we get some click path detail. One of the most interesting and noticeable things about this is that the number of times that (say) /Talk/pregnancy was followed by /Talk/pregnancy again has dropped a lot. This would be the case if pagination used to be on but now were off (the tracking doesn't distinguish between the views of each of the separate pages of the Talk topic homepages). But that's not so - they always had pagination and still do.

Looking more broadly at the path people take to get to a topic home page, that hasn't changed at all - the numbers before and after are amazingly similar.

So not MY suggestion then either? Boo. Hiss.

AHA! (Penny drops). When you did the code release, for me at least, the page displays changed so that instead of getting 50 messages per page it was reset to unlimited. Do you could according to threads served or pages served?

Does google analytics differentiate between mumsnet.com and www.mumsnet.com? There are more links to mumsnet.com than usual instead of using /blah/blahdeblah as the link - noticed this because I am using Stylish which does differentiate.

Do we could? Is that like "Is you is or is you ain't?".

Meanwhile, the number of threads one sees on a topic home page hasn't changed, so it's not that.