Many of you should know by now that I'm really big on numbers, and while 20,000 posts isn't as ominous a milestone as 1729, it's still worth bragging about. 20,000 is a respectable post count for a still young community with great no-spamming etiquette and a chat replacing the need for trivial posts (though we miss out on such useful reads as "Let's count to 1000!" threads). Several big old pioneers of the PbP format have post counts around 200,000. It'd be good for Miza to be there in 2012, cause you know, it's 2012 so we shouldn't be planning too far ahead.

Over the last 30 days we've served 280,000 pages not including bots, spiders and users with javascript turned off. Our site received 14,000 visits (up 22% from last month) of which about 1,750 were new to the site for a total of about 2,100 unique visitors. We consumed nearly 50 GB of bandwidth, up 40% from last month. The average visitor spends 27 minutes on the site.

Now, this is all sweet and stuff, but it is certainly not why most people read my stat entries. What they really want to know is - what are web surfers looking for when they stumble upon Mizahar? And so, we look at the google searches that brought people here over the last month. Thankfully, we've made some progress since the times when we owned the word Maseltoff. Changes made to the forums made it so people are usually looking for fantasy roleplaying stuff when they find us. Er, usually. Ahem.

Some people use google as a replacement for the search function, to see the places where their PCs are mentioned. I'm not counting those, or the queries from people who already knew Miza and were looking for a specific page. I won't bore you with the obvious "fantasy rp", "roleplaying plots", lore, etc, either....

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No, this isn't a whining entry about pushing you guys to start more threads, though those are always welcome. Cheese and whine are not my favorite dishes anyways.

Alright, I got a little sad going on Google's webmaster tools and checking out the list of keywords Google gets from our site. Most of them have absolutely nothing to do with what we actually do on Mizahar - can you believe 'roleplay' isn't in the top 200 keyword list? Our top ten is...

mizahar
character
lore
blog
post
gnosis
posts
often
zith
magic

So, we apparently abuse the word 'often' around here. Anyways, these keywords won't help us get more players from Google, so I've been making a few changes to improve the frequency of the keywords that really matter. Replacing 'play' with 'roleplay' on the menu bar was an obvious one. You should expect a few more in the near future. If you can think of places where we could easily fit a mention of words like fantasy and roleplay, then by all means let me know. We get quite a few hits from the search engines - too bad most of them are for such unrelated keywords*** that they don't help much.

*** unless you consider stuff like "the world's fattest cat" to be related to Mizahar!

P.S. Gossamer is #30 on the keyword list. Tarot is a humble #52.

So, I was neglecting the slides for my PhD defense 5 days from now as I yielded to my curiosity. I decided to practice my database querying skills to find out the highest word counts in the community and find out just how much we have written so far. I think the results are mostly unsurprising.

Username	Word count
Gossamer	216415
Nya Winters	198703
Abashai	99342
Gillar	78470
Tarot	77297
Kavala	61913
Akuaysun	59148
Colombina	49853
Chaelnomyl	49586
Cayenne	45779
Malia	38401
Stitch	38011
Sorian	34559
Terminus Norin	34508
Leo Varniak	33983
Liminal	33206
Kadarus	30954
Voreasos Alisier	30771
Zaira	30590
Alistair deGrey	26221
Kamalia Timandre	26167
Arabella Sintos	24444
Gromhir	22609
Devandre	21407
Evarette Karmine	21081
Alice	20920
Niall Raghnall	20668
Trista	19104
Ialari Pythone	19000
Sondra	17852

I don't do milestone posts too often, unless they are about the fantastic Hardy-Ramanujan number, which I celebrated when we hit 1729 posts and deserves further celebration when we hit 1729 threads, 1729 registered users, 1729 files in the lore, you get the idea.

It's February 1 in this corner of the world, though, and that means six months of Mizahar. Our first six months. We launched on August 1, 2009 and it's been a great ride. Most play-by-posts don't even last this long; they die within the first few months as the initial drive runs out and people move on to the next great idea. My worry when we started Mizahar wasn't that we would fold, honestly. I knew we wouldn't, because what causes a site to collapse is the admins/owners abandoning the project. I like to think I'm someone who gets things done, and so are the other Founders. My worry was that we might have a lot of trouble attracting people to the site, partly because of the difficulty in advertising a PbP and partly because of Mizahar's nature. The decision to keep Elves out the door did not come without a discussion on appeal and demographics. In truth, we didn't really know much about our 'market' as we didn't play on a lot of sites before Mizahar.

It turned out I'd underestimated the RPers on the web. I think the setting is now one of our main selling points, so to speak. The other side of the problem was a little more frustrating. Advertising a new PbP is kind of hard. Advertising without taking affiliates is even harder. You always start out at the bottom of all lists, surrounded by tons of dead sites. I think a lot of sites die while in the process of climbing through the piles of deader sites. I won't even talk about all the rejections I got from specialized directories, and the huge waiting times elsewhere. That's why I did Google ads for a little while, and they helped us a bit, bringing a few really cool people to the site.

But yeah, startup's not easy. We tried a banner exchange, only to discover...

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Every now and then I get teased about the barren waste that is my Facebook account. No avatar, no personal info, a handful of University friends I haven't talked to in years, and a bunch of game messages & invitations. I often claim lack of time, but sometimes I give the honest answer that I value my privacy, which almost always gets people giggling or rolling their eyes as if I had delusions of grandeur. There is a widespread and simply misplaced belief that privacy is only a concern for Hollywood actors and politicians. I can live with that, it doesn't bother me. There is a vicious version of the belief that really gets on my nerves, though - the "nothing to hide" voyeur's argument.

It goes like this: "You don't hide anything if you have nothing to hide." This seems to be the recent trend, and it's getting worrisome for me. Facebook has been casting privacy to the winds lately, with their terms of use changing almost daily to reflect the new policies. If you have a FB account, then more and more aspects of it are going to be public, you won't have a choice and you will be poorly informed at best. Friend lists already are public. So will profiles. In the words of the FB founder, "the world is going public". I love the English language, I really do (or I wouldn't be here ). Its power to express strong concepts with a minimum of sounds is unmatched. Unfortunately, it can be used for cheesy slogans like this, as well. Have you asked the world if he's going public lately? I've left a message on his answering machine, hope he'll hit me back shortly.

The Google CEO said: "if you do something you don't want anyone to know, then you probably shouldn't be doing it." This is officially scary (and definitely not the first time Google provides morality as a PDF download for the masses; turns out their motto "don't be evil" is not just a...

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