"Uncommon Descent" and "The Skeptical Zone" in 2015

Since 2005, Uncommon Descent (UD) - founded by William Dembski - has been the place to discuss intelligent design. Unfortunately, the moderation policy has always been one-sided (and quite arbitrary at the same time!) Since 2011, the statement "You don't have to participate in UD" is not longer answered with gritted teeth only, but with a real alternative: Elizabeth Liddl's The Skeptical Zone (TSZ). So, how were these two sites doing in 2015?

Number of Comments 2005 - 2015

year	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
UD	8,400	23,000	22,400	23,100	41,100	24,800	41,400	28,400	42,500	53,700	53,100
TSZ	-	-	-	-	-	-	2,200	15,100	16,900	20,400	45,200

In 2015, there were still 17% more comments at UD than at TSZ.

Though UD is still going strong, there is a slight downside trend (yellow line) in the daily number of comments.

The upside trend at TSZ is much stronger, but is fuelled by the very weak participation in the first couple of months of 2015. This can be seen when comparing the number of comments on a monthly base, too:

There are many ways how both sites interact with each other: the editors on both blogs may react to the same event, rising the number of comments on both sites. Or an editor, disgruntled with one site, may take his energy to the other one. Overall there is a slightly negative correlation (adj. R²=.256) between the number of comments per week:

There is one big difference between both sites: the number of posts. On TSZ, there have been 265 threads with comments, while this number was 1741 at UD (there were another 200 without any comments). Therefore, the number of comments per thread is smaller at UD than at TSZ:

At UD, most of the posts (16% or 271 out of 1741) gathered between five and eight comments (or 1,700 - 3.2% - of the 53,100 total comments in 2015), while at TSZ, most of the threads (20% or 56 out of 265) have between 65 and 128 comments (or 5000 - 11% - of the 45,200 comments)

This difference is shown in this stream of comments. With the notable exception of the thread Mystery at the Heart of Life, even the busiest posts aren't active for longer than a month at UD:

In fact, an average an article at UD will get comments over an period of 5.3 days. This average is 23.7 days for TSZ. Certainly eternal threads like Moderation Rules and Noyau play a role here, but other mainly philosophical topics are discussed over great periods of time, too.

My personal favourites of 2015 unfortunately got very few comments: Winson Ewert's offer to Ask Dr. Ewert at UD, Tom English's excellent reply A Question for Winston Ewert at TSZ, and then Dr. Ewert Answers, again at UD - which were commented less than eighty times in total. I had hoped for a discussion about the mathematical aspects of Intelligent Design (see my posts). Unfortunately, the design-side didn't show any interest in anything other but an token interaction. Another chance missed.

Note: UD and TSZ both use WordPress, so they should have numerous ways to get statistics for their sites. I could look only from the outside, crawling the threads and comments. Though I'm fairly sure to got the all the visible data, I cannot guarantee to paint the real picture absolutely accurately.