Did you Know? Car-Seat.Org 10th Anniversary Factoids

SafeDad

CPSDarren - Admin
Staff member
This will hopefully be the first in a weekly installment of factoids about the forum.

Did you know that Car-Seat.Org started in April, 2001? After having difficulty finding expert information about carseat compatibility for my son (b. 1998) and daughter (b. 2000), I saw the need for a technician-staffed forum that was advertisement free and allowed visitors to post questions without registration.

Sadly, it has grown so much that advertisements finally became necessary to support operational costs a few years ago.
 
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SafeDad

CPSDarren - Admin
Staff member
Re: Did you Know? Car-Seat.Org 10th Anniversary Factoid #1

Factoid #2:

I started my first BBS forum around 1983 or 1984. It was called "The Wall", named after the Pink Floyd album from a few years earlier. You could leave "graffiti" on the wall for other members to see. My original "screen name" was "The Rook".

Some comparisons of The Wall at its peak 25 years ago with today's Car-Seat.Org:

Computer: The Wall ran on an Apple II+ with 48 kilobytes of memory and 1MHz 6502 processor. Car-Seat.Org runs on a distributed server cluster of computers with many gigabytes of memory and multiple processors running at a few Ghz.

Connectivity: The Wall had a Hayes 300bit/s modem that hooked up to an analog phone line. Car-Seat.Org's provider has redundant high speed connections measured in billions of bits/s.

Storage: The Wall's database was around 250 kilobytes, stored on a Rana Elite floppy disk drive. There were probably 1000 posts in the database at most. Car-Seat.org's database is almost 2 Gigabytes, stored on redundant ultra high speed SCSI and solid state hard drives. There are over 1 million posts in the database.

Bandwidth: The Wall was text-only, black and white (unless you used a "green screen" monitor!). It probably transferred less than 1 megabyte on its best day. Car-Seat.Org transfers over 5 gigabytes on peak days.

Members: The Wall had at most 100 members. One member could dial-in at a time to browse and post messages. On a good day, perhaps 15 unique members might visit. Car-Seat.org has over 10,000 members and over 1,000 members and guests are visiting simultaneously at peak times during the day. On a good day, Car-Seat.Org has 15,000 unique visitors.

Most users of The Wall were male in the 12-18 year-old demographic. Most topics centered around music and high school, as you might imagine. Car-Seat.Org members are overwhelmingly female, mostly in the 25-44 age groups. Child Passenger Safety, children and daily family life dominate the topics.

"The Wall" ran through mid 1986 until it was closed due the sysops going to college and obsolete technology (newer BBS software had color, graphics and hard disk drives allowed more storage but that was way too much $$$). I wonder what kind of forum I will be running 25 years from now?
 

Admin

Admin - Webmaster
Factoid #3:

In January, we had 211,000 unique visitors who viewed 7 million pages. The peak day was January 17th, where 14,978 unique people visited. That day also set the record for unique visitors within a 1 hour period of 1,346 visiting around noon central time, one of the peak times of the day on a Monday, one of the peak days of the week.
 

mommycat

Well-known member
So cool, thanks!

Whatever forum you'll be running in 25 years, it will be in addition to this one, right? :whistle:

ETA: after all, we will all need to help eachother decide what seats to get for the grandkids... ones that attach to those mobility scooters. :p
 

Admin

Admin - Webmaster
Top 25 search engine phrases bringing visitors to Car-Seat.Org in February:

25) car seat

24) recaro proride

23) britax frontier 85 reviews

22) graco nautilus review

21) oobr

20) car seat crash test ratings

19) safest booster seats 2011

18) graco snugride 30

17) alpha omega car seat manual

16) evenflo symphony 65

15) narrow car seats

14) how long are car seats good for

13) graco smart seat

12) age for booster seat

11) cosco scenera

10) chicco keyfit 30 recall

9) recaro prosport

8) narrow booster seat

7) graco nautilus

6) evenflo maestro

5) graco nautilus reviews

4) car seat forum

3) car seat reviews

2) carseat forum
.
.
.
And the number 1 search phrase for February...
.
.
.
1) car-seat.org
 

urchin_grey

New member
Neat! I wish I would have found this place in 2001. :p I was 16 and babysat my cousin's 3yo and 1yo and she would just drop their seats off with them and I just had to figure it out on my own. Looking back, I'm horrified anyone would trust a 16yo with something like that, but if you knew her, you wouldn't be surprised. LOL
 

SafeDad

CPSDarren - Admin
Staff member
Woohoo! Awesome to see people searching out the forum by name! :D

The funny thing is that if you just put car-seat.org into your URL bar, the forum comes up!

I will note that like most months, the Graco Nautilus is again the most popular product phrase bringing visitors here from search engines. The Radian and Maestro are also often in the top 10 in recent months, though I'm not sure why the Radian dropped out in February!
 

Admin

Admin - Webmaster
Ever wonder what time of day is the busiest? The three columns from left to right indicate page views, hits and bandwidth.
 

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Admin

Admin - Webmaster
It used to be for years that Monday and Tuesday were busiest, with Weds-Fri somewhat lower. Saturday was typically much lower than the weekdays with Sunday only a little higher than Saturday. Now, the variations from day-to-day are much smaller, though the same general trend is still true.
 

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