From the monthly archives:
Just a brief public service announcement, always wear a helmet when cycling. This morning I was cycling to work from Brighton station down a steep hill. It was a one way street but with a cycle lane for cycling against the flow of traffic. A car didn’t see me coming down the hill and turned across my path into the road to my left and BLAMO! I went straight head first into the windscreen. Thank goodness for my helmet. see photo…
- J
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Mondays are always our biggest day on the site but this week we beat our previous traffic high by a mile. We received 64,000 absolute unique vistors, and 93,000 visits on a single day! That’s more than pass through the turnstiles at a packed Wembley Stadium! We attribute this to exam fever kicking in across the nation.
The exam period brings new challenges for our moderator team. Obviously people like to come to TSR to talk about their experiences but if you want to talk about an exam that some people haven’t sat yet there is a problem. Or if you want to talk in too much detail about a closed paper that again is an issue. We have a pretty close relationship with a number of exam boards including OCR and Edexcel who occasionally drop us an email or pick up the phone to bring our attention to a thread on the site that is going into an unacceptable level of detail.
Use your head when posting information regarding specific exams. Do read the posting guidelines issued at the top of threads and forums by the Moderators. As I say exam boards do check the site and they take these issues very very seriously. It isn’t worth getting into trouble over and you could jepardise your own results if the exam board choose to follow up their enquiries seriously.
To quote the person I spoke to at Edexcel the other week:
“The only way for candidates to be absolutely sure that they are not breaching examination regulations is to avoid any discussion at all once they have seen the secure question paper.”
Good luck with your exams if you are sweating them out at the moment!
The site coped pretty well with this much volume due to the excellent optimisation work that’s been done by our developers over the past few months. However we all agreed that we’d got to a point where it was time for another hardware upgrade especially with even higher volume days expected later in the year around exam results time.
So on tuesday evening we added a second database server. This is now helping spread the load of constant database queries which are made for example when writing, replying and editing posts etc. We hope you are finding the site really responsive now, we’ve had some good feedback to suggest you all are. 
This brings the number of servers behind TSR to a whopping 8:
* 4 Web servers
* 1 Load balancer
* 2 Database servers
* 1 Index server
You can see what these machines look like and where The Student Room physically lives by following this link: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/blog/the-data-centre-behind-gossamer-host/#more-57
I’ve been there its VERY cool!!!
We’ve been organising the official 2008 mod meet which is to be held in London this Saturday and Sunday. It’s something we organise every year to thank our Mods for their hard work and to sit down with them to discuss the continual evolution of TSR. We have some fun stuff planned and will definitely post updates on the goings on of the weekend.
Because summer is looming and with it BBQs, my favorite avatar of the week is: becky.fm’s: http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/member.php?u=65940
- J
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Last week I was talking at a conference for higher education marketing people in London. The delegates came along to hear a packed schedule of talks that ranged from universities describing what they were doing to market to students online, to other sites such as Bebo promoting their wares.
I was there to talk about how universities shouldn’t fear user generated content websites, places like TSR, blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook. Websites where students can write anything about anyone (within the rules of the website). I wanted to show then how they too can take advantage of these online tools.
Companies generally have been pretty scared about user generated content, they no longer have the solid grasp of their reputation that they used to, word of mouth can now spread very widely. What existing students say about a university is the top influencing factor prospective students take notice of when making their choices of where to attend.
So I tried to put their mind at ease and show them how they can benefit by reading what is written about them online. How they can modify their practices and generally investigate issues that their students have written about online because most of it is valid stuff. Here’s a example, this TSR user can’t find the info she wants on the Northumbria website:
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?p=12115122
A representative from Northumbria was in the room when I showed this post and she was really interested and said she’d look into it for sure. It’s a simple example but shows that universities can learn and benefit from what is written about them. I know of another university that reviewed and changed their course offer procedure because they read on the student room that it was taking ages for anyone to hear from them.
I used the results from the survey we have been running on the site to show just how balanced most most discussion on TSR and elsewhere on the web tends to be. Of the users that completed the survey 77% said they would respond with their own views if their university was being criticised unfairly online. Similarly only 2% said they’d go out of their way to criticise their university.
Universities are creating profiles in Facebook, they are watching what’s being written about them in blogs and on forum sites but they haven’t quite got to grips with how much they can interact in this world that they feel out of place in. Clearly some uni’s are more tech savvy than others and some unis don’t have to worry at all about this sort of thing because they just get enough applicants whatever.
The future online role of traditional university student ambassadors is interesting, we’ll probably see more and more the same people that show students around in open days creating freshers pages on Facebook and posting answers to questions on TSR. I think this has got to be a good thing for everyone as long as its not done in too much of a promotional way and that its about information provision.
Take a look at the replies to the survey referred to above if you wish:
http://tinyurl.com/63rexm
(the open ended questions are not visible for privacy reasons)
- J
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Last September we made some big changes on the site, we have been evaluating those changes and making plans as to what we do next… In December and January we ran a survey on the site when we gave away a Nintendo DS and a Camcorder. In that survey we asked site users loads of questions about how they use the internet for help with their studies, how they use TSR, what they like about the site, what they’d like to see improved and what new features we should introduce. We also got feedback in the survey on some of our own ideas. Since then we’ve been running a series of focus group sessions with students at a range of stages in their education, some of them had used TSR before, some hadn’t, some were long term users, some were moderators. We have been putting together all of the information we have learnt from these activities, as well as what you tell us in the About forum and all that has influenced our plans for the next steps with the site. Some of those plans are short term updates, for example changes to navigation and namings of links. Others are more substantial developments. In the next few weeks we’ll be unveiling these plans to you which will be rolled out gradually between now and October/November. There’s some really cool stuff! I’m particularly excited by the plans for customisation of the site so you can tailor some parts of the site for how you want it to look with the features you want to use. More details to follow on the forum in the coming weeks. FYI – It was a no score draw at the last Wii competition I think. Better commentry will follow the next encounter. – J
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It’s a busy time in the office and on TSR. I’ve been amazed to see all the record breaking days we’ve had over the last few weeks. Until recently we’d never broken the 60,000 barrier for visits in a day. But over the last few weeks we’ve been steadily growing and this week has been better than ever with a massive 75,000 visits each day so far – and exam season hasn’t properly started yet so more records will be breaking soon!
If you’re interested in following a record yourself, you can watch the number of users online at one time. It’s currently at 3,671, so it’s hard to believe that a few weeks the record stood at just under 3000 – a number achieved last results day. What will we reach this results day? To keep up with these levels of traffic we are in the process of adding another database server to share the load on the site so things like Editing, Posting, Replying are still speedy even when 1000s of people are doing it.
Speaking of the results day, clearing is also a busy time on The Student Room. Exams might not have been sat yet and results day may be many months away, but planning is well underway this end for the results day and clearing period – traditionally the busiest time of year for the site. We’ve been looking at developing our range of results day and clearing articles with the help of Juno. I’ve been working on a format for a new ‘Clearing Contacts Directory’. We hope to have more dates about all of this for you soon.
Finally we’re also getting excited about the up coming moderators meeting in a few weeks. It’s a time where we can give a big ‘thank you’ to the mods for all their hard work with some fun activities, but also gives us an opportunity to all get together to discuss ideas and developments on TSR. Last May I was lucky enough to go to the meeting in York where we had a great time with a bucking bronco and clay pigeon shooting (Acaila nearly killed someone I remember). This year should be as good as ever – we’ll have updates on all the goings on soon.
RK
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This week I had an excellent meeting with Apple. They run a student discount programme for people in further and higher education and would like to promote that fact on TSR.
We kicked this off at the start of April with a relatively small campaign of announcements and banners just to see what sort of interest there was with our users. Now 30% through and the campaign is going very well with plenty of TSR users clicking through for more information.
Large organisations are sometimes guilty of throwing money at a problem often with mixed results. Not in this case, I enjoyed the meeting with Apple so much because they seem genuinely interested in what we are doing on The Student Room. It’s a lot more fun when we can think innovatively about opportunities to work together with advertisers that benefit both parties especially when in this case it’s with a company with the prestige of Apple.
I had another interesting meeting on Friday this week with a university that have advertised on TSR a few times. We have a good relationship with them through our education ad sales company. We met up with them to have some open chats, us getting feedback from them on some of our ideas and in turn hearing from them about the challenges they face. Better understanding will come out of it helping us in many ways including to better tailor our ad packages to suit their needs.
TSR HQ Office Updates: P got back from holiday at the start of the week. Keepy uppy ball has a problem with the valve and keens deflating. We have an Acumen Wii competition planned for monday night and we should be in possession of Mario Kart for the Wii by then. CN, P and I have provisionally planned to have a bike race on our lunch break next week along a stretch of Brighton sea front. (CN and P just got new bikes and think they are invincible). Start laying your bets on who will win Wii and cycling. The wise money is on yours truly! Snack of the day – Feast ice lollys, a modern classic!
Over and out – J
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