Just The Stats, Ma'am...

Smiley appears to be down again. I don't go there very often these  days. 

Given this thread now exists, it seems only sensible to keep it going with the current monthly stats. Plus, right now, it's a distraction.

The January 2024 posting figures:

It also would be interesting to know the number of people on each of those boards who actually post. Is it technically possible to extract that data too?

Check the birthdays in the shout box.  They are participators. 😂🎂

There’s a lot of reasons for the decline of Smiley:

1: one of the biggest ways to even come across it was through search engine results, and after several outages in 2022 and 2023, a lot of those smiley results either disappeared or were made a lot less prominent.
Even just five years ago, if you had any question about or relating to “Beach Boys”, a lot of the search results were links to threads on Smiley.
Now you’re a lot more likely to find posts from Reddit, Hoffman and here.

2: they’re absolute refusal to modernize their website. It still looks like a website from 2005, not 2024.
Opening it in a modern web browser, the first thing you’re likely to see is a security warning since they continue to use the old “HTTP” standard instead of the more modern and secure “https” standard.
Not to mention, their website is very finicky for mobile devices, which is where more and more web traffic is coming from.

3: the fact that it’s its own website that needs you to create your own account for it, and there is just very little incentive to do that anymore when Facebook groups, discord servers and Reddit pages on The Beach Boys exist with a much more robust set of tools at their disposal.

4: the constant outages.

5: the fact that most of the insiders have abandoned it other than the occasional promotional post here and there.

6: kind of the same as number three, but the fact that there is just more places to talk about The Beach Boys, while for quite a long time Smiley was kind of like the central hub of the fandom. That really isn’t the case anymore now, the fandom is splintered across literally dozens of different places.

7: even people who don’t use much social media and stick to these very dedicated forums are way more likely to get a response here than they were at Smiley.


As someone who doesn’t really know and doesn’t really care about whatever rivalry there was in the past, the simple fact is that there is just no reason to go to Smiley anymore. Everything from its URL down to its interface is clunky and decades out of date, the first thing most users are going to see is literally a security warning to not visit that site, if anyone does make a post it could take days or even weeks for them to get a single response sometimes, and there are just plenty of other simpler, easier, more reliable places to go.

It’s sad because there is so much important information in the 19 years worth of posts that exist there, and I hope it’s possible to keep a lot of it archived, but it should have been either totally rebuilt or turned into a Facebook group years ago.

OK, the posting/member pecentages for EH & TD:


So, as you can see, on EH & TD respectively, 77.12% and 71.93% of members have posted 9 times or less over the course of roughly five years.

First off Matthew, there is no rivalry. This Forum, along with the old Pet Sounds Forum came into existence because a lot of the beginning members were banned from SSMB. Many were banned unjustly. I don’t give a rat’s ass how well or how bad they do. They are old news and do not matter anymore. Secondly, I have no issues whatsoever with the Today board. We have always been friendly and we are not rivals. We coexist and hope to remain so well into the future.

March figures: apologies for the delay but my wifi was out for five days:


Year on year:


Bit of a slow month again.