From the monthly archives:
In previous years the number of TSR users coming to the site has tended to tail off after the summer holidays as people go back to school and start university. Not so this year. Take a look at the graph:
It’s brilliant to see such great growth this year so far and i’m sure it will continue 
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Everyone on TSR should give extra big kudos and rep love to the PS Helpers this month, they’re always superstars but it’s been an especially very busy time for them.
F1 Fanatic (the mini mod in this area) just finished sorting the statistics and the Helpers have done over 690 Personal Statements in the past month!! That’s around double the figure for last year and is an amazing achievement.
If you see any members with PS Helper under their username make sure you give them a pat on the back. If you were one of the 690 people who were lucky enough to receive their expertise be sure to pass back your feedback to the team and good luck with your application to university
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We’re blogging on Bebo’s ‘Meet The Freshers’ site. Take a look:
http://www.bebo.com/meetthefreshers
and click on Blog at the top.
We’ll be putting up a new blog post each week related to going to university. This week it’s some tips for attending the freshers ball…
To coincide with this we’ve now got a Bebo profile ourselves: http://www.bebo.com/thestudentroom
TSR Member Randdom has been doing a grand job making some updates to the page and we have a thread in About where people can make suggestions to what we should have on there:
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=679086
This is a nice chance for us to work closely with one of the largest sites on the internet and it should make a load of students aware of TSR for the first time which has to be a good thing
Finally our Freshers photo page is very thin on photos. If you’ve just gone to university and have taken some silly photos enter the competition here:
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=680262
-J
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We often talk about the development work going on in the background at The Student Room but I thought it might be interesting to explain how work requests come about and how we manage them, from small bug fixes to larger scale projects.
Bug fixes, small tasks
These tend to originate from a TSR member pointing out some functionality that’s not working, or a template that doesn’t look quite right. Members generally report these things in AAM and in the About Forum. They tend to be quite small problems that usually don’t seriously impede a members use of the site, rather they are an annoyance (albeit an extreme annoyance in some cases).
Examples of this sort of request recently finished, or currently being worked on:
Medium sized tasks to large projects
Medium to large scale projects come from a variety of sources. As well as keeping an eye on what key competitors are up to and general web trends; site surveys are an excellent method for us to get new feature ideas from the whole community, we usually run a big site survey to gauge opinion a couple of times a year the last was Jan 08.
We get suggestions posted by members in the About forum in particular in the user wishlist. Meeting students face to face at focus groups and usability sessions, meeting and talking to the site Moderators these things all contribute to the overall direction the site takes which then break down into individual projects.
Examples currently being worked on or planned:
We have a team of three developers on The Student Room, two of whom only work half their time on the site, so effectively we have the output of two full time developers.
The developers balance their work between large projects and bug fixes. There’s always an awful lot of work to be done so prioritisation is very important.
We use an online work management tool to help us order all our projects and prioritise them so developers know which to work on. Next week I’ll post more about how that all works.
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