Many thanks Graham and all moderators for providing a great and friendly discussion board.  I don't visit every day, but when I do, there's always something informative, entertaining, annoying, or fascinating to be found.

 
The Coffee Shop had a busy August, with 135 new topics and 1,334 new posts.  And goodness only knows how many real reads by however many people; our stats for the "worker" server show only those read requests that the "receptionist" server can't answer straight off, and Google Analytics has been muddied by events from countries like Singapore and Brazil though it has filtered out a very high proportion of autonoma.  It does report in excess of 100,000 events from the UK in the last 4 weeks - that's around 3,500 per day.

I say "busy" but that's not out of the ordinary - below, you'll find graphs of the number of new topics (the blue areas) and of new posts (the red areas) going back to the Coffee Shop's foundation. Month by month, we have some serious peaks and troughs and I can't see any one reason that explains them all. Some can be noted as "that one was because ..." and the reason is often external to us such as a GWR or rail industry event.  In some ways I hope we remain as busy in September, but then I do NOT hope for any further accidents such as Lewes and Wickford, nor any major service disruption caused by heat, timetable changes caused by dry conditions, or the failure to have enough operation trains to run advertised services.

Beware - these graphs show this year on the LEFT and go back in time as you read right




The Coffee Shop would not be what it is today without the help and support of its membership - contributors, moderators and administrators - a superb team all of volunteers to whom I (as webmaster) extend my thanks.  Whilst it's true I spend a lot of time here as well, that's only a tiny proportion of what it would be without that help - you all make it easy, and a pleasure too.