Robowarriors: More visited than CD!

[Tim Arnold]

First of all, a huge congratulations to team 41! Taking a look at FIRSTTopsite.com shows that Robo Warriors, team 41, is actually more visited than Chief Delphi! Right now, CD has 771 hits and Robo Warriors has 952.

In the spirit of Gracious Professionalism, I request that the method for bringing such traffic be revealed, as I think all website teams would greatly benefit from learning how to drive such intense traffic to their website. Spreading FIRST comes through inspiration, and what better way than attracting thousands of visitors a day!

[synth3tk]

Congrats Team 41! All FIRST webmasters do a great job, but to bring in so many hits is nothing short of awesome. Keep up the good work, hope this inspires web teams everywhere.

[lynca]

Team 41 , Use Google Analytics and make your report public, so we can see what geographic location your traffic is coming from.

[Elgin Clock]

Not to downplay the awesomeness of having a site that is higher today in rank on topsite than CD, but....

It seems like the site is under maintenance and being worked on.

Can repeated F5's by Team 41's code monkey(s) testing to see if the site is lookin' good be the cause of the jump in traffic readings?

Just a thought.

Or..... lol Look in your pulldown for the back button when you get to the site. Google syndication, and it's hosted off an x.mac.com/ address.
Google + Mac = Traffic? lol
I guess so.

[chris31]

I think the first topsite only counts traffic that clicks on the first topsite link and then is redirect to the teams website. So, this just means more people get to that site via an image or link rather than typing in the URL. I would guess most people have CD bookmarked or just type the URL rather than clicking on a first topsite image.

[Schnabel]

I was just thinking, did they get rights from apple to use the buttons at the bottom? The reason I wonder is as their popularity increases, Apple may notice and that can cause problems.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by chris31

I think the first topsite only counts traffic that clicks on the first topsite link and then is redirect to the teams website. So, this just means more people get to that site via an image or link rather than typing in the URL. I would guess most people have CD bookmarked or just type the URL rather than clicking on a first topsite image.

Yup, mostly everyone I know has it bookmarked and on top of the list.

[Graham Donaldson]

Originally Posted by Schnabel

I was just thinking, did they get rights from apple to use the buttons at the bottom? The reason I wonder is as their popularity increases, Apple may notice and that can cause problems.

I wondered that, too, Schnabel, when I first saw it- the thought that ran through my head was "Holy ****, that's some advanced/nice programming!" (I don't know diddly-squat about websites, so I wasn't sure). However, when I clicked on a link and watched the bar at the bottom of firefox, it showed "homepage.mac.com/......". I followed the address- seems to me like this is part of Apple's iWeb/website hosting, & 41 would therefore would have rights to use the buttons.

If someone knows I am wrong, please feel free to correct me (I'm guessing on this).

[Cjmovie]

It records visits by IP information simply from the image being loaded (this is why it's required to have the image of your site's place on the website, every page).
So to get a jump this high, it would require that many unique IPs loading the page. Generally that requires either a lot of individuals or a lot of proxies :-)

However, proxies is by far in the realm of doubt as there's no easy way to find that many that work well and fast enough to not timeout. My best bet is that they ask everyone at their school to visit every day.

[Uberbots]

Yeah, i'm betting someone has that image pasted in some large public website, because i have trouble believing that they could be getting more hits than CD in any other method but cheating. If they are legit, then my apologies, but it seems fishy.

btw canuck- the code behind that really isn't complex. I'm using something similar to spiffify the image gallery on our website... it probably took me half a day to perfect the system.

[Pat Arnold]

I'm not a web (or computer) person, and do not understand the stats listed on topsite for each team listed. When reviewing details of team stats, there are columns listing "Unique In"/ "Total In" & "Unique Out"/"Total Out" data. Does anyone have a "definition-for-dummies" for these terms? Why do some teams, such as the Robowarriors, have 0 "In" numbers?

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by Cjmovie

It records visits by IP information simply from the image being loaded (this is why it's required to have the image of your site's place on the website, every page).

If you notice, Chief Delphi only has it on the portal, and not any other page (that I can find). That means there is a lot more traffic that is not recorded by FIRST Topsite for CD.

For comparison, here are the Alexa traffic details for chiefdelphi, but 41 isn't even listed.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...hiefdelphi.com