AnyDice Users 2011
some statistics
I've been running AnyDice for three years now, and it has grown quite a bit! Since its launch, the web app has been visited over 76,000 times. 47,000 of those visits happened during 2011.
Where from?
By far the most visits were from the US. The UK and Canada were a distant second and third, followed by a collection of EU countries including France, Germany, and Sweden.
How was it found?
Initially, most people found AnyDice through the forums over at rpg.net. I've been a frequent visitor of their Design & Development forum during 2009 and 2010.In early 2010 there was a huge visitor spike from StumbleUpon. It died out as quickly as it appeared, being very short-lived. I guess a few of those people became regular users.
While the amount of visitors from rpg.net nearly doubled in 2010, it was responsible for a far smaller share of the total visits than it was the year before.
In 2011 Google became the largest source of visits. Lots of people looking for a dice probability calculator ended up finding AnyDice without trouble.
Which Operating Systems?
The large majority of visits came from machines running Windows. Last year, about 30% of those were still running Windows XP while 13% still ran Vista. The rest was using Windows 7, with only a few exceptions.Two-thirds of those running OS X had Snow Leopard while 10% were using Lion. The rest had older versions, down to Tiger.
Visits from iOS devices have more than doubled compared to 2010. More than half come from iPhones, the rest from iPads and a few iPods. Traffic from these devices is becoming significant.
Visits from Android devices have been virtually nonexistant before 2011, but now the Android visits are about equal to the number of iPad visits.
Which Browsers?
Firefox is still the most popular browser, but it lost a lot of ground in 2011, mostly to Chrome. What version was used is all over the place, mostly ranging from 3.6 to 8.0.Chrome nearly doubled its share compared to 2010, at the expense of Firefox. Which version was used also varied a lot, mostly ranging from 8 to 16.
Safari's share grew a little. I don't have nice data about which versions are used, but nearly all appear to be between 5.0 and 5.1.
Internet Explorer's share remained stable. Just over 70% used version 8 while vitually everyone else used version 9.
Donations?
Donations are very much appreciated and encourage me to spend more time on AnyDice and help peope with their dice mechanics. During 2011 I've received 25 donations to keep the site running, raising a total of $172.50 and €35.00. I'm very grateful to these generous people!I hope AnyDice will be of use to lots of people in 2012!
I, for one, am quite happy with AnyDice and find myself visiting it routinely in research and just to check its progress. I hope you continue development and look forward to the following (hope they're on your list):
1. Roller: Auto-expand result area for larger rolls (currently limited to monitor display size). What about labeling rolls in the result window to enable cut/paste functionality (play by post, for example)
2. Saved Rolls: I appreciate the ability to create a link to a particular roll, but would like to see a dropdown list with predefined or saved rolls (D20 3d6, Fudge, etc). I think this would enhance a visitor's experience and provide another mechanism to for visitors to learn how to better utilize AnyDice.
3. Export: would like to see the Minimum and Maximum results in the lead line of the export, as well as the total number of possible permutations.
4. Client-side version: definitely like the idea of using it offline, especially when I have no connectivity.
Thanks for your efforts and keep up the great work Jasper!
Nice to know you're still enjoying the tool!
1. Roller output line wraps now and I prepended the name. Is that more like it?
2. You mean something like http://anydice.com/program/d51 provided by default or linked to somewhere?
3. I added the minimum and maximum. Permutations aren't computed (and are potentially infinite) so I can't add that.
4. Client-side Javascript is not gonna happen and a full desktop version is not economically viable. However, a possibility might be to store precomputed distributions locally. A dumb client if you will, which needs an internet connection to compute stuff but can recall past distributions (and can roll them) while disconnected. Would you be interested in that?
Jasper,
checked out the changes:
1. Looks great!
2. If you haven't already, check out Troll (http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/troll.msp) with its dropdown boxes.
3. Changes are good. I'm sure you could calculate permutations within certain limits... :)
4. Definitely interested in any client-side/offline option.
Not gonna put such a drop down box in AnyDice, I rather place examples in the docs. I'll look into it once I revisit the documentation.
I've put "investigate dumb offline version" on my to-do-later list!
Fair enough!