spe•cious |ˈspēSHəs|
adjective
superficially plausible, but actually wrong: a specious argument.
That is exactly what I meant.
FWIW, I just conducted a rough survey of activity among
Guests in
Who's Online. As always, the vast majority of these were
Reading a post. Of the sixteen such threads I was able to load before the page refreshed, twelve were older than six months. I didn't have a chance to determine the referrer for these sixteen threads, but in a subsequent go-round with
Who's Online,
every single Guest (of perhaps two dozen)
whose online status was Reading a post had been referred to that post from Google. (Interestingly, roughly half of those were from other nationality's Googles, with the UK and Canada leading the list and Germany also appearing multiple times.)
These observations support my contention that the vast majority of FTM non-member traffic comes from folks researching specific questions via Google search. Yes, some of those then look for other posts in (presumably) the same forum—7 out of 231
Guests were
Viewing a list of posts—and some look at the Main Index—16 of 231 were
Viewing a list of forums, although 7 of those occurred in a clump, intermixed with
Registering a new user, which all shared the same first three parts of the IP address, making it clear that these were all part of an automated spam effort.
I certainly won't insist that
none of those who explore FTM a little more deeply after the initial exposure decide to join (or not to join) on the basis of their perception, derived from the number of threads displayed in forum indexes, of the scope of the site's knowledge base; I just think it's likely to be quite a rare occurrence.
As I outlined before, my belief is that the overwhelming majority of people come here looking for very specific information as a result of a Google search. Those who don't find the information they're looking for move on to the next likely-sounding search result. Those who
do find what they're looking for already have positive feedback for their visit that far exceeds the visual impact of a list of posts.
That said, unlike grelber I have no objection to the default time range being lengthened to the maximum since, as I said earlier, I normally look at neither the main index nor the individual forum indexes.
