O&A Website Traffic Statistics

The O&A website run by the SCA College of Arms is a crucial resource for the Society’s heraldic community, serving as the canonical reference for registered names and armory.

In August 2024, I was given the opportunity to review and analyze five weeks of server access logs in order to get a sense of current usage patterns.

As with all web traffic analysis based purely on log files, this exercise had some significant limitations: in the absence of Google Analytics or an equivalent web analytics tool, I had to rely on IP addresses and user agent strings to classify traffic and reconstruct visitor behaviors.

All of the numbers below should be taken as estimates, and it’s possible that some of them are off by a significant factor — but for the time being, this is the best source of data we have to go on, so let’s dive in.

Visitors

About 3,000 browsers visited the site in the 35-day period from July 14 through August 17, 2024. (Cases where a person visited the site from multiple locations, such as on their home computer and also from their mobile device on the road, would be counted as two browsers in this analysis.) This traffic does not include bots and crawlers, discussed separately below.

Of these, one thousand of the browsers visited just one page and then left forever; many of these are likely folks who wandered in via search engine links and either had their question answered immediately, or realized that they were on the wrong site and left.

Another thousand of the browsers viewed two to four pages and then left, and the final thousand viewed five or more pages, some many more — of those thousand heavier users, about 350 browsers viewed 5-10 pages, another 300 browsers viewed 10-20 pages, and the final 350 browsers viewed over 20 pages.

At the high end, 35 browsers viewed more than a hundred pages each over the course of the month, including one outlier who viewed an average of almost a hundred pages per day! (And yes, I double-checked and it did appear to be a real person.)

All told, those 3,000 browsers issued just over 30,000 requests for pages, including the home page, search forms, and search result listings.

Search Modes

The key function of the O&A website is searching the armorial database in one of a handful of ways. This breakdown shows roughly how much each search mode is used:

4,840 views / 1,100 browsers — Name pattern search and results
2,080 views / 660 browsers — Ordinary pages and armory listing
2,440 views / 480 browsers — Blazon pattern search and results
4,150 views / 590 browsers — Complex search search and results

After people view the results of a search, they often click through to the individual registrant names, and sometimes also to the year/month/kingdom.

2,424 views / 1,020 browsers — Individual name view
637 views / 350 browsers — Letter year/month/kingdom view

Search Options

Most of the armorial search forms support a common set of display options, including armory descriptions and glossary links. Of the roughly 11,420 searches using such forms:

1,804 had armory descriptions enabled
34 had the glossary enabled
25 had dates shown in SCA format

There were also 13 requests to the standalone glossary viewer; this feature clearly is not used much.

Of the 4,840 name-pattern searches:

285 had case-sensitivity enabled
28 were in “narrow” mode

Of the 2,440 blazon pattern searches:

13 had case-sensitivity enabled

Of the 4,150 complex searches:

45 had “only show registered results” enabled
2 had “only show unregistered results” enabled
15 had raw mode output enabled

Some of these features are used so rarely that these occasional invocations might just be accidents.

Complex Search Criteria

Of the 4,150 complex searches, here’s the number that used at least one of the indicated type of criteria:

3,713 searches for armory
251 searches for blazon
177 searches for name
75 searches for broad name
37 searches for date/kingdom
21 searches for record type

Notably, the complex search form allows people to combine multiple criteria, either of the same or different type, in any number of combinations. Unsurprisingly, various combinations of two or more armory criteria does constitute over 85% of the usage, but the variety of other search types speaks to the flexibility of this tool.

The frequency for various combinations of criteria is set forth below.

904 armory (3x)
784 armory (4x)
626 armory (5x)
543 armory (2x)
362 armory (1x)
307 armory (6x)
131 name
100 blazon
77 armory (7x)
68 broad name
43 blazon (2x)
43 — (no search criteria entered)
22 armory AND blazon
19 armory (8x)
16 blazon AND armory
15 name AND date/kingdom
15 armory (3x) AND blazon
14 name (2x)
14 blazon (2x) AND date/kingdom
7 name AND record type
7 blazon AND armory (2x)
6 armory AND name
6 armory (2x) AND blazon
5 broad name AND date/kingdom
5 blazon AND record type
5 blazon (3x)
4 blazon (4x)
3 record type
3 blazon AND armory (3x)
6 armory (4x) AND blazon
3 armory (9x)
2 record type AND broad name
2 date/kingdom
2 blazon (2x) AND armory
1 record type (2x)
1 record type AND name
1 name (3x)
1 name AND date/kingdom AND record type
1 armory AND record type
1 armory (2x) AND blazon (2x)
1 armory (2x) AND name
1 armory (5x) AND blazon
1 armory (6x) AND blazon (2x)

Crawlers and Bots

That human browser traffic is dwarfed by automated crawlers and bots: nearly 600,000 requests were received from devices other than people using a browser, making up over 90% of the total traffic.

This traffic was split between traditional search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo), “AI” crawlers (ChatGPT, Alexa, and numerous unlabeled LLM crawlers), Facebook’s crawler, and a smaller number of malicious bots probing for common security vulnerabilities like insecure PHP or ASP scripts.

Some of this traffic is useful and some is not, but it is challenging to efficiently filter out the malicious and wasteful requests without incorrectly rejecting some real requests from actual people, and so for now we’re stuck with it.

Morsulus Software Agenda

I’m gearing up to take on the Morsulus office in the next couple of months, and will be posting here about software development activity in three broad areas:

The toolchain that Morsulus uses to maintain the master version of the O&A database currently runs on the officer’s personal computer; I’d like to migrate this so it runs in the cloud.
The O&A website mostly looks and works the same way it did when it was first written thirty years ago; I’d like to add a modern web interface while retaining the existing UI as a “classic mode” option for folks who are accustomed to it.
The LoARs are authored as structured data but then published as very simple HTML files; in the long term, I’d like to see a modern presentation that made it easier to browse and search, and cross-linking to related entries, to the O&A, and to emblazons from OSCAR and the legacy archives.

Those are listed in intended sequence; I’ve already started work with the back-end Morsulus toolchain in order to enable the office transition, and hope to be able to turn my attention to the O&A website in a few months, and to the LoARs within a year, if things go well.

Report from Winter 2025 KWHSS

My head is spinning after this weekend’s online Heralds and Scribes symposium, which was chock full of presentations and informal networking. I learned some things, shared some things, and have made long lists of things to work on in the coming months.

There was an hour-long presentation of the graphical elements and arrangements found on Classical-epoch Greek shields, from the eye of a reenactment herald. There were some differences from Medieval-epoch European heraldry — designs don’t seem to be inherited within families, and are optimized for round shields rather than kite shields — but there are also lots of commonalities. The presenter did a great job of taking us along on their exploration of the topic. It would be fun to help some people who want to design and register arms for classical-era personae.

I took a class on armory charge-group analysis, which is a topic I already know reasonably well, mostly to see how this particular instructor would approach the topic; they covered the same material, but from a different angle and organized differently than I have on previous occasions when I taught this same class, and I hope to learn from that in fine-tuning my own presentation of this topic in the future.

But most of my participation in the symposium was focused on networking and exchanging information with other senior heralds about the technology the College of Arms uses, because they have asked me to take on the office of Morsulus, which is the web / software / database volunteer who publishes the College’s registrations of names and armory.

I took two classes, each an hour long, covering two different ways of conflict checking (searching the database of heraldic registrations for similar armory), each one using a different feature of the web/database tool that I am taking on responsibility for. In both of those classes I was furiously scribbling notes about the details of their techniques in order to guide my software development efforts in the years ahead — I need to simultaneously not break any of the features they rely on, and not make their expert use of the site any less efficient, while also trying to make the site easier to use and understand for the next generation of heralds.

I also did a one-hour presentation about the various IT systems that the heraldic community depends on. To do so, I wrote up a catalog listing all of the examples I knew of, explaining briefly what they do, providing some technology details, and listing some ways that folks who wanted to volunteer might be able help. I published my work at dove-cote.org/chits.

Most of the presentations were recorded, and will wind up on YouTube somewhere in the next few months, but that doesn’t capture the “hallway track” — informal conversations with other heralds, outside of the organized panels, chit-chatting in the “social lounge” Zoom session, or sticking around in a panel’s breakout room after a presentation and talking with the other participants.

Ultimately, that was the most valuable part of the experience — it’s important to refresh the social connections between heralds from other kingdoms, and there’s some crucial information exchanged in small-group conversations that helps to set the agenda for a bunch of work in the year ahead.

I’m glad I invested the time, but now I’m ready for a hot bath and some sleep.

Geographic Divisions of the SCA

A recent question from a newcomer to the Society reminded me that our system of branches is not particularly intuitive, and spurred me to put together this simple visual overview, which leaves out a lot of potential complications in order to focus on the most common elements of the structure.

The SCA is organized as a number of regional chapters, each of which has its own internal subgroups.

This diagram shows the most common group types, but for historical reasons there are also lots of exceptions.

Every group has a local set of officers; gold crowns mark the groups which are also led by titular nobles.

Chart available in hires PNG and printable PDF formats.

When it comes to the smaller branches, some of these come and go every year, and it’s difficult to be sure how many of the groups are currently active; I imagine that the Society Seneschal has a list, but as far as I can tell it is not published anywhere.

Publishing the LoARs to the Web

My thanks to Herveus Gnome for letting me watch over his shoulder as he published the November LoAR so that I could document this process here.

In addition to maintaining the O&A website, the Morsulus office is also responsible for publishing the LoARs to the College’s website.

Production of the LoARs in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, XML) is handled by Silver Staple, the post-meeting clerk. The final LoARs arrive as an email with attached zip files, distributed to the Sovereigns and relevant staff.

After unpacking the final-FORMAT.zip package of HTML and PDF files, the resulting folder is renamed to numeric form of the month — in the case of November that is 11.

Then an index page is created by copying welcome.html from the prior month’s folder, and the month name is updated in both written and numeric form — s/October/November, s/24-10/24-11. The errata link might need to be commented or uncommented, if last month’s letter included one and this one doesn’t, or vice-versa. The copyright date also needs to be updated for the first letter posted each year. Other material in the index file, such as a line of PHP code that was added recently, can mostly be ignored.

Make sure that the files are all set to world-readable, or Unix-style 644 permissions. Then copy the files to the production server with scp -r 11 charlemagne.sca.org:loar/2024. (This pathname works because Herveus has a symlink at ~/loar that points to the web directory that holds the LoAR files.)

Lastly, the loar/welcome.html file is edited to uncomment the link to the current month’s directory. When publishing the January letter each year, a new line of month links has to be made by copying the previous year’s and then commenting out most of them.

At this point, the newly-published LoAR should be available on the http://heraldry.sca.org/loar/ page, and this process is completed for the month.

Historical Trends in Extraordinary Titles

There’s recently been an effort to update the list of Heralds Extraordinary, originally maintained by Modar Neznanich but now posted as an official College reference. Jeanne Marie Lacroix did an amazing job of checking through the entire set of records, filling in gaps and making corrections throughout.

Based on that data, I put together a little chart showing the number of new Heralds Extraordinary created each year since the rank was established.

It’s interesting to see the distribution change from around an average of less than two per year during the first two decades to nearly ten per year starting in the middle of 2002. I’m not sure what triggered the culture change, but it sure is dramatic.

Even with the increased rate in recent decades, this remains a small group, with just over 250 people so recognized in 42 years.

Caveats

This visualization is based on the data available to date, and it’s possible that a few items have been overlooked or that some entries will end up being shifted by a year or two, but this should be reasonably close to the final result.

Note also that record keeping in the early years of the College was somewhat haphazard, and in some cases we only have a date for when a title was registered rather than when the rank was awarded.