2024 Site Stats

[Lemming]

Both sites - coffeeshopdirect.com (ACD) and coffeeshopmenus.org (FBN's menus) - had a great 2024 in terms of the numbers of people visiting them. The ACD was visited over 1.7 million times and FBN over 1.9 million. These are the biggest numbers for ACD since around 2014 and probably the best ever for the menus site.

In the shorter term, there has been an extraordinary rush of visitors to the ACD over the past few weeks. Daily numbers have broken records set way back in 2012.

Historically, traffic on the ACD increased steadily from its birth in 1998 through to 2010. Numbers then remained high until 2014 when they went into a steady decline, bottoming out in the Covid years. Since 2022 there has been a gradual recovery, but, until very recently, we haven't hit the heights of our heyday.

The previous daily record was 7,633 visits to the site on 28th April 2012. Around that time, numbers over 5,000 per day were normal. After 2015 we never saw 5,000 a day again until recently. Then, from mid-December 2024 we had several days with over 10,000 visits, hitting a new record of 14,539 on 26th December.

I don't have long-term records for coffeeshopmenus.org. At the time I took it over, it was already getting nearly as many visitors as the ACD and soon overtook it. The current surge in visits to the ACD hasn't carried over to FBN's site, at least not yet.

Incidentally, if you look at the number of users online at the bottom of the index page of these forums, you'll see a slightly different statistic. At time of writing that says that the "Most users ever online was 1167 on Mon 16th Mar 2020". The number of people currently online will probably be a much lower number. This is because of some blocking I put in place a while ago.

A while back we were having some problems with the forums appearing to run very slowly. It turned out that this was because we were maxing out the resources on the server. Further investigation revealed that a few users, such as Facebook, were bombarding the server with requests.

I'd long suspected that many of the guest users on the forums were actually spambots searching for places to post shit. When I found that certain bots were a bit hyperactive, I blocked them at server level. (Not all bots are bad, some are search engines indexing the site). One consequence of this is that the 'users online' number displayed on the index has reduced dramatically.

It's always possible that the current surge in visitors to the ACD is some kind of bot activity. We'll see. Hopefully the heavy traffic will bring new advertisers offering huge sums for ad space. That might be helpful as my space on the server is rapidly filling up with menus.

So, happy 2025 everyone! ACD and coffeeshopmenus.org hope that they will continue to be popular.

[AzLaker]

Thanks for taken the time @Lemming. This site is and always will be a great place to find the latest happenings of current and past coffeeshops, not only in Amsterdam, but pretty much all of the Netherlands. Thanks for ACD & ACD Forums.

AzLaker

[avfc-herbalist]

Interesting Lemming! Very happy that The ACD is growing again

[Ghost]

Nice !! ACD back on the way up latest coffeeshop menus and reviews will always be a place people check out on the forum while planning a few days in town and before heading off, plus there is so much more to read and have a look at when you arrive at the site.

[Hobie]

Thanks for all you do , Lemming

[HitTheNorth]

Long Live ACD.

Thanks for everything you do @Lemming and good to see an upward curve.

[Old Time Stoner]

Nice little read, thanks for putting the time to put that together.

I'm a newbie as a member, but this has been my number 1 resource for years, and should be the first place to visit for stoners wanting to find out more before, during or after a trip.

I'd have been wandering aimlessly for hours and hours, missing gems if it wasn't for this site. Congrats on the numbers, long may they continue to increase!

Feeling I should also contribute as well as use for a resource, decided to join... STILL FINDING GEMS as a result. Thank you!!