Hey all — just a heads up that we’re expecting to have some short read-only maintenance time for discourse.julialang.org at some point today. Discourse is upgrading us to a dedicated server as our increasing number of pageviews had been causing trouble for the other sites that had been colocated with us. The total read-only time should only take ~20 minutes or so. Let us know if you see anything amiss after the upgrade!
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That reminds me I haven’t seen usage stats for Discourse in a while. I seem to recall that members of a certain trust level could access them but either I can’t find it anymore or I’m not levelled up enough…
They’re available at https://discourse.julialang.org/g/trust_level_3/reports for “Regulars” (trust level 3)
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Thanks! Looks like Discourse is moving us just when we stopped being popular 
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Excellent market timing on our part
Yeahhhhh, that dip is unfortunately* part of the story. In short, pageviews are one of the metered metrics for discourse’s pricing tiers, and we had been exceeding the posted limits of our plan by quite a bit. Hosting and traffic do cost real money, and they’ve given us some special considerations and we want to be fair to them. We had been expecting to bump to the next tier at some point… and in times past they had asked us to do so.
A good chunk of our traffic is from search engine crawlers. To bring the traffic down to a manageable level for discourse, GoogleBot, BingBot and others were throttled to one access every 30 seconds in June. This did reduce our crawler pageviews, but Google did not like this. I suspect the others did not either. It dropped our search rankings because Google was thinking our site was broken, so it also significantly impacted real eyeball views.
We noticed this in early September and we’ve been working with Discourse staff to resolve it. Two weeks ago we removed the throttling and it looks like Google is already starting to view the site more favorably, so hopefully we’ll be back up there soon!
* or fortunately, if you’re a glass-half-full kind of person — it doesn’t really reflect a decrease in interest in Julia, just a decrease here
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