Welcome to 2018! Here's Your Yearly Helping of Numbers and Misc Information!

Question

Welcome to 2018 everyone!

Glad you've made it through the chaos of 2017. While you're here I've complied some neat information of last year that you may find interesting!

Previous Years

2017 | 2016 | 2015

---

Site Traffic

As always we'll start off with how much traffic the site has gotten. During the 2017 year there were 32.1 million views globally, with only 4.6 million of those views originating from the U.S. This is an average of 2.675,754 page views a month.¹ With August being the busiest month and December seeing the biggest downward turn. This is quite an increase from previous years though.

---

Users

Helping us maintain these high view counts are the abundance of new users and dedicated veterans! Through 2017 23,693 new users joined the WordPress Stack Exchange but only 3,165 earned more than 50 reputation and only 509 users earned more than the Stack Exchange "Trusted User" default reputation of 101. Thanks to those folks this brings our whole user base to 99k users!

The most active new user award goes to Fayaz contributing 105 valued answers and earning 3,496 reputation this year!

The most active regular user award goes to Jack Johansson contributing 498 valued answers and earning 9,142 reputation this year!

Winter Hats! Jack Johansson ran through the competition gaining a total of 13 hats giving him the #1 spot on the WPSE Hat Leaderboard. David Sword coming in a close 2nd with 9 hats.
View Leaderboard

---

Questions and Answers

Throughout 2017 there were 15,301 new questions and 14,145 new answers. Of the 15k questions, ~3.5k were view positively with 1 or more upvotes, less than ~1k are currently sitting with negative scores, and ~4k of those questions have accepted answers. There are currently ~5k questions without downvotes and 0 answers. As of writing this post, this brings our Question to Answer Ratio back to the 2015 percentile of 71%.

• The Most Favorited Question
  • WordPress 4.7.1 REST API still exposing users by mirsad
• The Most Upvoted Question
  • WordPress 4.7.1 REST API still exposing users by mirsad
• The Most Viewed Question
  • Custom templates not showing up in template dropdown by Tom
• The Most Upvoted Answer
  • How does WordPress create URLs that Apache knows about? by Fayaz

The top tags have only changed in order since last year which is not much of a surprise:

1. [php] with 1,583 questions, 565 wtihout answers
2. [plugins] with 1,480 questions, 641 without answers
3. [custom-post-types] with 1,215 questions, 464 without answers

During 2017 we saw Stack Exchange roll out a new header with review queue numbers replaced with "warning lights" for lack of a better term. Whether you like the changes or not the community came together and closed a total of 837 off topic questions. Below are the tags attached to the most closed questions:

1. [plugins] with 115 closed questions
2. [woocommerce] with 110 closed questions
3. [php] with 86 closed questions

---

And with this I'll open the answer section for you to post any WordPress related achievements or stories you experienced this past year. Along with what you would like to see from the community in the coming year(s). With the start of the year we'd also like to wish you the very best!

Answer 1

Last year I was at my first ever WordCamp. It wasn't just any assembly, but WordCamp Europe which was held in Paris. Actually this trip was most of the reason why I came (back) to WPSE - I think it was Tom J Nowell who in the Q&A after a talk mentioned the WPSE site, and me having been on SO for some time, I got back here and am very happy about it.

But that is not the point I wanted to make.

Even though, as I have been told in the time since, we did everything wrong by mostly attendeding talks and speaking only with a couple of people (since then most suggested the "doorway track", aka networking, getting to know others in the community better), a spark in me that is WordPress got reignited.

And I don't mean the software itself, nor the great amount of products and services around it.

But the people.

And not even the amount (~1.200 in Paris), but from so many different fields. There were programmers, as I am one, but also marketers, content creators, activists, (starry-eyed) idealists and so many more. All of those coming together and constructively working on projects, WP itself, sites like WPSE or even facebook groups is what really amazes me.

When I am back in my bubble I always try to remember that. That the WordPress community has all kinds of people. From the smallest bloggers, through NGOs, regular companies to great enterprise companies. And I'm feeling very comfortable being in their midst.

Since I am also regularly attending the local WP meetup and am excited for the coming WordCamp Europe, which will be in Belgrade.