The basic stats, how many people are registered. How many posts the forum has. How many threads.
I will still show users online. I think that builds a sense of community, but I'm not sure about these stats... If they help, or hinder, or encourage people to make competing forums if big numbers, or if they really have no effect either way on these concerns.
A lot of people like it so they can see growth. To see what threads are the most popular and the most viewed.
It depends what you are using your site for. If you are a software support site, stats are hardly relevant, but if you run a community it's a point of discussion and reference.
Stats are for admins, not for users.
(2014-04-16, 10:44 PM)brad-t Wrote: [ -> ]Stats are for admins, not for users.
Stats can be achieved by executing queries on the SQL Server, thus, I don't need them to waste queries per pageview.
Users don't need to see stats. I still have them on a couple of forums, but I'm moving away from having them available with future projects. It can be a point of discussion, as Lo. stated, but I don't see why anyone would care for that type of discussion in their niche. If you want your users to see your growth, send out newsletters every now and then with your site's accomplishments.
Don't let your potential users run off by seeing small stats. Let them judge your site by the content and discussions you have on it.
@lo, I don't mean most viewed and most popular.. I actually think that could be of some use and show life... to have a box with most viewed/popular threads....I was talking about the basic stats at the bottom
I've eliminated all of them except for users online and "Say hello to our newest user, blahblah". I thought it was kind of nice to leave something down there. I think otherwise it could make the forum look quite dead. Which I suppose wouldn't matter if you had a very large regular user base, but otherwise could help with making it look like there's actually someone else there using the forum.
The normal stats such as total threads and posts and total users, I've eliminated. I think no matter how fast you grow, these numbers will still seem to move slowly.