The State of the Community (2023)

Another year older, another year wiser - and a whole year without @Rich Hawley having sunk a boat! (Good job!)

Forums
After a bumper year in 2022, forum posts were up again in 2023 - which is always nice to see. Well done everyone and thanks for making the site your home and for keeping the community going!


Registrations were also up this year gone.

As I have explained before, I do not necessarily see this as a good thing. Many of them are near instantly banned because they are spammer registrations or are using disposable mail addresses. Unfortunately, we get a lot of account registrations that will be sold-forward and might be used to post spam in 6 months time. The war continues.


Site Programming
As ever, the site remains nearly entirely custom coded, with 2023 being no exception on the maintenance front. Most of the changes were loaded into the first half of the year, with improvement to CAB Maker, the introduction of the Forum Notifications system (as well as back-porting everyone's unseen historic "notifications" - which took literally days of CPU computational time by the server). Equally, there was an excessive amount of refactoring and re-engineering of the SCL/DLC this year, although for the most part there was little visible changes on the site UI (the work still took many weeks though).

The site code weighs in at 150,680 lines, growing about 2500 over the year (and about 4000 from its low of 146,657) but is way down on its peak of 246,845 lines at the beginning of January 2022 when the great clean-up project started. It is so much more easy to maintain now, and faster.


News
As with Forum posts, the home page news section saw more posts during 2023 than during 2022 - largely thanks to @torch for finding ideas (and also for writing his fist solo home page news post too. Kudos!)



As always, if you have news post ideas, info or titbits, do get in touch!


Revenue
As ever, we still carry no ads or sponsorship. The site remains entirely self-funded. As ever, I have had plenty of people contact me to tell me that I am the devil incarnate because they can't download everything that they want without either having to become a valuable member of the community or contributing to its running costs (or both).

It was never something that I wanted to do, but the economic reality is what it is - something that has been covered in other threads.

To those that have supported the site financially, my eternal thanks to you for your support over the last year. You are the only reason why the site can still be online. To those of you who refrained from posting or emailing in to tell me what a terrible human being I am, thanks for your restraint!

Donations made to c-amie.co.uk also go into the HPC:Factor kitty, and between the two sites, donations were up 7% on last year - not down again at least as had been the recurring trend. There is enough there now to allow new SSD's to be procured at some point this year as the drive is getting near capacity - which I'm sure will keep @torch happy!

For those who have tried to use these (highly capricious) eBay and Amazon referral link, again my thanks for trying, even if they are not always successful.

Again, including c-amie.co.uk (which all goes to HPC:Factor). eBay made £93.65 and Amazon £98.50. Not a lot, but this is basically the SSD's paid for, so please do use them if you can as they do help.


Downloads
It has been another good year for new Windows CE downloads being restored/added to the community, with some 2.7GB of data being made available. Although this is substantially down on last year - I hold myself to blame for this as clear I have not whipped @torch nearly enough this year as I must have done last year

In all seriousness though @torch has done a great job getting the lost and found of the CE world restored to availability. Thank-you @torch for all your hard work and contributions here once again.

https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/get-attachment.asp?action=view&attachmentid=5847

This year is the first (not quite complete) year where download logging has been in-situ, so I can see what you have been downloading without needing to resort to grotesque filtering of the HTTP logs.

Top 10 Downloads

• 1. Plus! Pack for Windows CE Handheld PC Pro Edition 3.0: 388
• 2. PowerToys 2.0: 125
• 3. Doom 0.92: 85
• 4. Microsoft ActiveSync 3.8.0.5004: 74
• 5. Devuan D7 Images 20210715: 49
• 6. CeHttp 2.37: 43
• 7. TCPMP 0.72 RC1: 40
• 8. PowerToys 3.0: 40
• 9. DoomCE 0.1: 39
• 10. BetaPlayer 0.96 (Beta): 38

Top 20 downloaders

• 1. kjwin67 (58087 MB)
• 2. thenzero (26015 MB)
• 3. paulfiction (14376 MB)
• 4. jayskay (12793 MB)
• 5. gdryke (7837 MB)
• 6. Karpour (7125 MB)
• 7. ShadowMaster (6663 MB)
• 8. C:Amie (6594 MB) - almost exclusively me testing and bug fixing
• 9. sroland81 (5619 MB)
• 10. RayPals (5545 MB)
• 11. Whaleback (4260 MB)
• 12. pokemon32 (3763 MB)
• 13. PapaBoo (3664 MB)
• 14. Saidp (3499 MB)
• 15. pacmania1982 (2642 MB)
• 16. TFGBD (2388 MB)
• 17. archival36 (1712 MB)
• 18. I dunk for bananas (1555 MB)
• 19. torch (1525 MB)
• 20. Kaviennn (1436 MB)

So there we have it, 2023 in review.

As was my position this time last year, I do not have any explicit engineering plans for the site in 2024; although I have been mulling on the idea of modernising the Forum's attachment system. I'll think about it.

As always though. If you, the community have any ideas for what you would like to see happen here. I would love to hear them! After all, this is your site too!


Best to you all in 2024 and my thanks to you all for your support and for being part of this community. I hope to see you around the site!











Attachments
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01-ForumPosts.jpg (68KB - 0 downloads)
02-Registrations.jpg (86KB - 0 downloads)
03-NewsPosts.jpg (79KB - 0 downloads)
04-NewDownloads.jpg (57KB - 1 downloads)

What a great write-up/overview. Encouraging to see current post numbers always exceeding the year before, a trajectory going back to 2011. We hang in there, and as ever, we have Chris to thank.

Jake

Woot top 17! I was dreading that I have downloaded so much for my WinCE 2.0 devices and the Jornadas I got on 2023.
For year 2024 I might drop from the top 20 downloaders.


Thank you C:Amie and to our fellow subscribers/community.

How can one drain some GB with these little software packages ???

Happy new year, btw

Stefan

I would love to know too, but bandwidth last year was over 0.5TB: couple of hundred for repository.hpcfactor.com and the remainder for www.hpcfactor.com and admin systems.

It adds up. Especially with dev VM's.

And ya'll want free downloads, no registration and no ads.

I know what you're saying about those instantly banned spammer registrations - I've banned quite a few myself including one just yesterday. It's a fact of life these days - the vast majority of people calling my phone are people I've never heard of and don't want to know, all trying to find ways to make a buck off strangers.

Oh, so that's why you stopped answering my phone calls!?

It is really irritating, but it is nowhere near as bad as it was 2004-2007 before I started to re-engineer the forums to disincentive it (or force them to waste a lot of time in order to quite quickly see their senseless drivel get deleted).

It's like when you get one of those scammer calls, just waste as much of their time as possible, it distinctnesses that particular individual from calling again. For example, my favourite is if they ask for me, I'll say "no, sorry, hold on I'll get him for you" and just put the phone on mute, them go back after a few minute and tell the scam-artist that "he's coming, just a minute" and see how long he'll sit listening to silence for.

I outlived all my relatives. If it were not for spam calls, I would have no one calling me. Probably just as well that I am the end of my biological lineage. Like Orrorin tugenensis, I have outlived my purpose and been superceded by a newer generation.

Great write-up! I did not have much time last year, but I do check often
I just quit my job yesterday and will have more free time to spend with my handhelds this year, it'll be great!

Fantastic job on running this site. Without HPC Factor, there would be no HPC community these days anymore, so your efforts are appreciated, and my donations will of course continue

You quit your job? so what's in store for El Karpour now?

HPC:Factor needs a content writer if you're interested, I can pay you in reaffirming superlatives

It's how I crawled out of the wreckage of my own self-respect.

Jake

And from the ashes, a Phoenix arose, reborn!

Still smoldering, dammit!

Jake

Excellent 'State of the Community' summary....like all the graphs too.

Thank you so much, fearless leader, Chris for all you do to keep the site up and running.

I've been glad to help support your efforts and wish that more people would.

I always think that for the price of a couple pizzas, people could make a contribution, doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice to do.

All the best to you and everyone here for a great 2024!

Mark

Great write up, it's nice to see the community growing. HPCfactor is a very valuable resource for anyone with a handheld PC, its a shame that people get upset at the expectation of contribution of time or money to access the downloads!

As always a huge thanks to Chris for continuing to run the site and to everyone who contributes!