9,000!

9,000! is the proud headline of a post by Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent. The whole thing reads:

The post before this one was UD’s 9,000th. Thank you to all of our readers for your support as we celebrate this milestone.

So congratulations! But a comment by SCheesman pours a little water into the celebratory wine:

I wish I could celebrate, but I fear 9000 is a reflection of a vast inflation in the number rate of postings in the last year or two, with a corresponding decline in comments.
I owe a good deal of what I know today about ID from UD, both from a scientific and theological perspective, and used to enjoy the long threads and back-and-forth between proponents and opponents.
But now, many, if not most posts get nary a comment, and the ones engendering some debate often are lost in the crowd. Since the recent purge of participants who failed to pass what amounted to a purity test, it’s been pretty quiet here. The most lively recent discussion featured a debate between OEC’s and YEC’s. Now I enjoy that sort of thing (like on Sal Cordova’s old “Young Cosmos” blog), but it’s hardly what UD used to be known for.
Maybe the new format gets more visitors than it used to, but I’d be interested in seeing the stats, including comments per post, posts per month, unique visitors etc. over the last few years.
I miss the old days. I expect a lot of us do.

I'll try to satisfy the curiosity as good as I can.

Posts per month

CHeesman is spot on: “9000 is a reflection of a vast inflation in the number rate of postings in the last year or two” Since the beginning of 2011, the number of postings per day rose dramatically: the years before there were on average over the year 2.1 — 2.5 new posts per day, while in 2011 the number more than tripled to 7.9 posts per day (2012 until May 14: 7.7 posts per day)

Comments per month

The number of comments per day was between 61 and 68 in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010, while the years 2009 and 2011 were much more lively with 112 comments per day in both years. The number has dropped sharply again in 2012: it dropped from 115 comments per day in Jan 2012 to 43 comments per day in Feb 2012 (in Apr 2012 it was 46.5 comments per day) “it’s been pretty quiet here”, indeed.

Comments per thread

The boxplot of comments per threads shows the minimum and maximum number of comments per thread per month as well as the lower and upper quartiles and the median. Mar and Apr 2012 show a kind of record: 50% of the posts in those months were commented once or no time at all. Compare the years 2009 and 2011: the number of comments in both years was nearly the same (record-breaking 40,800 and 40,900). But in 2009 there weren't many posts which were just announcements and attracted no editors to comment.

Unique visitors

I can't say anything about the number of unique visitors per month, only about the number of commentators: an amount of more than 200 different editors per month was regularly achieved in 2009, but only twice in 2011. What SCheesman called the “recent purge of participants who failed to pass what amounted to a purity test” seemed to have lead to a declining number of commentators in 2012.

Conclusion

I assume that the rise of posts at Uncommon Descent lead to a surge in automatically generated messages (new post at Uncommon Descent) and therefore in a rise in traffic, at least at the beginning of the surge. Now visitors of the site don't expect lively discussions for every post any longer: I rely on the column of Recent Comments to spot those threads worth my while and don't bother to even read all the headlines. Or as SCheesman put it “But now, many, if not most posts get nary a comment, and the ones engendering some debate often are lost in the crowd.”