A TiFaux Madness! Postmortem

Posted by Kyle April 23rd, 2007 at 06:01pm In Blogworld

 Here’s a fun graph from your webmaster:

These are our daily “unique visitor” stats since March 1st. I’ve removed the numbers so you can’t tell how popular we really are. Notice the fairly stable traffic pattern leading up to all hell breaking loose. It was fun to hit ridiculous single-day records like on April 11, but it’s nice to see the numbers going back down. We’re still getting hits (and votes. sigh…) on the tournament pages but things should be back to normal soon. I hope a few of you out there were lured in by our tournament honey pot and stuck around for the incisive and witty commentary you found on the rest of the site. But for the majority of the tournament commenters, don’t let the electronic door hit your avatar’s ass on the way out.

It was really fascinating to see the fervor that certain fans had. Once we turned on IP logging I assumed cheaters would give up. But people actually went through the trouble of using proxy servers to fool our software into thinking they were a different computer. I know some of you consider that cheating, but honestly if you’re that dedicated to making sure Michael Vartan makes it to the next round, your vote should be counted more than once. I mean, it’s not like anything was actually at stake here. We just wanted to have some fun.

And there will be more fun in the future. I’m going to work on ways to add more interactive features like the Tournament, and there will certainy be more tournaments of different kinds. Maybe the next one will be designed to be less appealing to 14-year-old girls.

The best thing about this whole process: it was our highest-grossing month ever! Not that any of our new visitors bought a shirt or anything, but quite a few of you clicked on our lovely contextual advertisements. We might actually get paid by Google this year!