This is the first in what I hope becomes a series of yearly review posts.
2023 marks the first full year of operation since MacScripter.net transitioned from from FluxBB to Discourse.
I admit that I’m pleased and surprised the transition to Discourse went so smoothly. The Discourse platform offers a lot more statistics about the activity taking place on the site than I had previously, hence all the tables below.
Overall, we are seeing a slow decline in activity on MacScripter.net throughout the year. No obvious explanation exists for this other than perhaps interest in AppleScript continues its decline as Apple continues to focus on Shortcuts for user automation on all its platforms.
Moderation
New Moderator
Christopher Stone (@ccstone) joined Nigel Garvey (@Nigel_Garvey) as a MacScripter.net moderator this year.
Moderation is a thankless task and Nigel and Christopher contribute a lot of their time to MacScripter.net. Please respect the sometimes difficult decisions Nigel and Chris must make to keep the site civil and usable.
Moderation Stats
Judging by the stats, it’s been a great year for behaviour on the site. We’ve had relatively little moderation activity on the site which means people are getting along.
| Stats | |
|---|---|
| Moderator Notifications | 5 |
| Moderator PMs | 59 |
| Moderator Revisions | 181 |
AppleScript Status
With the release of macOS Sonoma Apple continues to keep AppleScript running and it remains a supported part of the operating system. This being said, AppleScript has not progressed in any way with the release of macOS Sonoma.
We see Apple advocating developers build Shortcuts actions instead of providing AppleScript (AppleEvent/Object Model) support in their applications. This is a significant long term problem for AppleScript’s continued relevance. Developers are unlikely to remove existing AppleScript support, but I expect we’ll see fewer new applications offering AppleScript support.
Objectives For 2024
My plan for 2024 is “steady as it goes”. I don’t see any need to make significant changes as the site is working and nobody is complaining.
If opportunities arise to improve or expand the MacScripter.net service I’ll look into it.
When I moved MacScripter.net to Discourse, I thought it made some sense to merge the Script Debugger support forum into MacScripter.net since there is significant overlap. However, I’ve decided against that as the two forums serve quite different purposes and the burden of operating both forums has not been that great.
I have a pet project to provide a means of viewing Shortcuts files directly within MacScripter.net, but this is still very much a work in progress.
Site Stats
Here are some site statistics at the end of 2023.
Topics: 41.4k (+ 616)
Posts: 232k (+ 5,563)
Signups: 33.3k (+ 372)
Site Status
| 2023 Statistic | |
|---|---|
| New User Signups | 372 |
| New Topics | 616 |
| New Posts | 5,563 |
| Logged In Views | 273,123 |
| Anonymous Views | 1,257,709 |
| Crawler Views | 6,262,550 |
| Total Page Views | 7,793,382 |
| Likes | 1,199 |
| Avg. Daily Engaged Users | 9.3 |
| Max Daily Engaged Users | 28 |
Top Referred Topics
Top Referrers
Here are the top sites referring people to MacScripter.net:
| Site | Clicks | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| www.google.com | 265,685 | 6,770 |
| macscripter.net | 92,483 | 2,624 |
| www.yahoo.com | 13,110 | |
| www.bing.com | 8,632 | 51 |
| duckduckgo.com | 6,174 | 386 |
| www.google.com.hk | 4,502 | 169 |
| www.baidu.com | 3,287 | 5 |
| www.google.co.in | 2,642 | 59 |
| www.google.cn | 2,528 | |
| www.google.de | 2,467 | 184 |