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This is not a question; more an observation from the "site analytics" below. I am surprised/impressed by the regularity of the traffic, which reliably plummets on the weekends, and shows a significant depression over major holidays such as Christmas and New Years. My own interaction is almost the obverse of this activity profile, but that is likely explained by the job profile of the regular contributors.

          Traffic
          Site analytics traffic, Nov 2018—Mar 2019
Also notable is how steady-state the traffic appears. This is good news for MathOverflow, as previously there seemed to be a decline in interest (Slight downward trend in Q & A.) At least at the displayed time scale, it appears we are in a healthy steady-state.

Added in response to @StefanKohl's question, 4 yrs of data on posts:

          FiveYrs
          Site analytics posts, Mar 2015—Mar 2019

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    $\begingroup$ How does this look like on a longer timescale -- say, the last several years? $\endgroup$
    – Stefan Kohl Mod
    Commented Mar 10, 2019 at 9:40
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    $\begingroup$ @StefanKohl: The traffic data cannot be extended much beyond a year, so instead I added posts data. $\endgroup$
    – Joseph O'Rourke
    Commented Mar 10, 2019 at 13:26
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    $\begingroup$ Thank you. -- I think the post data confirms the "healthy steady-state" you already observed before. $\endgroup$
    – Stefan Kohl Mod
    Commented Mar 10, 2019 at 17:39
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    $\begingroup$ This may seem reassuring, but it would be better to track number of active users. We have some who are very frequent posters; remove their contributions from the data, and you may see a very different picture. I think we should not let this picture lead us to doing less recruiting. Gerhard "Think Of The Future Readers" Paseman, 2019.03.10. $\endgroup$
    – Gerhard Paseman
    Commented Mar 10, 2019 at 21:15
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    $\begingroup$ @GerhardPaseman If you want stats such similar to "number of users with at least one post in given month" (or some other kind of activity), a suitable tool for this is Data Explorer. (Some basic knowledge of SQL is needed to be able to created queries.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Mar 11, 2019 at 18:32
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    $\begingroup$ Who knew: mathoverflow users are actual humans! $\endgroup$
    – Najib Idrissi
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 8:44

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Gerhard Paseman's comment suggests that it might be interesting to know also how the number of active users changed over time. (Of course, this also depends on the definition of active.)

Here is a community wiki answer where we can collect various SEDE queries that show some data on this. Feel free to add other queries that might be interesting in connection with this question.

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    $\begingroup$ So about 1000 "active users." The posts-graph seems to show a slow decline over the years, but the comments-graph is holding steady. $\endgroup$
    – Joseph O'Rourke
    Commented Mar 17, 2019 at 11:03
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    $\begingroup$ Of course, it is possible to run the same queries also on meta: posts, comments. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Mar 20, 2019 at 1:43
  • $\begingroup$ Martin, can you please interpret, say, the meta-posts graph? That is about 20 per [what]? Per week, per month, per ... ? $\endgroup$
    – Joseph O'Rourke
    Commented Mar 23, 2019 at 1:07
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    $\begingroup$ @JosephO'Rourke It is exactly the same - the number of users with at least one post (comment) in a given month. If you switch to the tag with the result set (rather then the graph), you can see the results in the format where numbers are shown together with the corresponding month (and you can also see the SQL query there). $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Mar 23, 2019 at 1:39
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks, Martin. Your mastery of this and other details contributes much to Meta. $\endgroup$
    – Joseph O'Rourke
    Commented Mar 23, 2019 at 1:44

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