As someone who uses Aleaxa to gather competitive analysis, i've always had a lot of pride in the way that FT was ranked. Before changing technology, we often we listed in the top 10,000 Web sites on the Internet. That seems to have changed with our ranking post- technology change.

But, when i look over the internal stats on use of FT, we are surpassing the daily post counts from pre- technology change and our daily new member enrollment hasn't leveled off, still growing on a daily average count. In fact we had a record number of new members for a single day a few weeks back with somewhere between 3-400 new members in a single day.

I am baffled by the Alexa ranking since we could not be busier. In fact, we may well be at all-time highs. Prior to the tech change we were often averaging a daily bandwidth of 1-2 Mbps, we're now averaging 3-4 Mbps.

And when you look at things like the Iceland thread. I think we had nearly 80,000 people view that in something like a week's time. That's a lot of traffic for a thread in Mileage Run - it wasn't even in what we consider a major forum, ala United or MileageBuzz!

All I know is what I know - traffic on FT is at record levels and continuing to grow. Heck, because of traffic we had to increase our contract for bandwidth - now costing us nearly $2,000 a month for a rack and 5 Mbps.

I can't explain the mystery of Alexa, but i still use it as a guide.