Curious

[KBsDarling]

What happened on Nov 21st, 2007 at 5:28 PM to have most users ever online (3,677)?

 

The date suggests maybe an ad leak? Just curious if anyone knows what caused the record

[Brad]

That was the Wednesday before BF (always the biggest day of the year for the site) so all the ads were already out by then. We had a very big news story hit (likely appearing on CNN's home page) that was unplanned and brought a huge amount of traffic to the BF site. Shortly before that story hit, we had posted a big, prominent link to the BF forum on the main BF site because we had posted all the online sale info on the forum, so when all that CNN traffic went to the BF site, many of them also clicked that big link to the forum which caused the spike here.

 

We usually never have such a prominent "CLICK HERE" link to the forum on the BF site, which is a big reason that record hasn't been broken yet. There have been many occasions since that day when we've gotten more traffic (including a few times this year), but we'd rather have people on the BF site than the forum.

 

So basically, if we wanted to set a new record, I could do it fairly easily whenever we get a big news story, but there hasn't been a reason to send all that traffic to the forum instead of keeping them on the BF site where the ads are. The servers can handle the surge of traffic much better on the BF site compared to the forum. When that record was hit back in 2007, I doubt many of those 3,677 people could access the forum because the servers were so overloaded, so that record doesn't matter too much to me.

[KBsDarling]

Thanks for the info! Was just curious how it came to be. Really puts a # in my eyes to how many people you have hitting on here during the pre-BF crazies!