Inside LabourStart

I’ve just sent out a message to the 3,654 members of UnionBook saying that unless they can recruit another 1,346 members in the next 100 days, we’ll have to consider shutting down the site.  I’m not saying we’re shutting it down on September 4th, 2011, but if we can’t grow it, if people aren’t really using it, it’s not worth the time and effort being put it into it.  Let’s see what kind of response we get.

Update after 3 days (30.5): We’re up to 3,707 – a gain of 53.  I’ll be writing to all UnionBook members again in about 11 days – we’ll see if we’re on course for 5,000 members by then.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:
—
Mailing lists (with over 100 members)
English: 56.584 [56,950]
Norwegian: 2,759 [2,760]
French: 2,481 [2,462]
Spanish: 1,532 [1,614]
German: 839 [854]
Turkish: 689
Italian: 526
Russian: 493
Polish: 302
Portuguese: 252
Chinese: 243
Dutch: 234
Finnish: 178

—
Social networks
UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,593 [3,503]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,369 [4,332]
Like LabourStart.org page 962 [120]
Twitter – followers: 3,469 [3,269]
Union group on Flickr: 637 [635]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 334 [318]
—
Website
Correspondents: 866 [865]
Unique visits to the site this month: 532,236 [509,194]
Page views this month: 1,245,761 [1,291,153]
Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):
* English 49,471 [45,959]
Our web host (1&1 Internet) no longer provides details beyond the 30 most popular pages, and none of the other language pages are in this category.

UnionBook suffered its first spam attack today, as reported to me by a number of users – and which I spotted myself as I received quite a bit of the spam. I immediately shut down the account and banned the spammer. I posted a notice on top of UnionBook explaining what happened. I will be emailing everyone who wrote to me about this.

But how did this happen in the first place?

We approve every new member of UnionBook by hand – and if someone doesn’t put in a genuine union name, we block them. In some cases, the people may be genuinely interested in UnionBook, but it’s supposed to be for trade unionists, so to prevent spammers we have been extra cautious and basically kept out everyone who didn’t seem to be real.

In this case, I believe the spammer managed to put in a genuine union name when registering and was approved.

Remember that the approval process also requires them to use a genuine email address and (I think) pass a CATCHA test as well.

All we can do is be even more careful in the future …

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 76,177 [+3,774]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 63,403 60,240 [+3,163]

Unique visits to the site this month: 466,615 540,582 (-73,967)
Page views this month: 1,318,172 (-209,368)

Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):

* English 41,236 (44,183)
* French 5,707 (5,084)
* Norwegian 5,306 (5,033)
* Finnish 2,281 (2,121)
* Polish 1,670 (2,016)
* Russian 1,340 (1,851)
* Dutch 1,232 (1,523)

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,379 [+285]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 4,313 [+163]
Twitter – followers: 3,114 [+202]
Correspondents: 855 [+11]
Union group on Flickr: 617 [+22]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 300 [+24]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,753 [+10]
French 2,452 [+67]
Spanish 1,591 [+303]
German 854 [+8]
Turkish 694 [+179]
Italian 538 [+6]
Russian 498 [+3]
Polish 303 [no change]
Portuguese 253 [+11]
Chinese 245 [+1]
Dutch 236 [no change]
Swedish 228 [+3]

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 72,403 [+1,620]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 60,240  [+1,322]

Unique visits to the site this month: 540,582 (-11,153)
Page views this month: 1,527,540 (-409,670)

Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):

* English 44,183 (41,748)
* French 5,084 (4,676)
* Norwegian 5,033 (6,768)
* Finnish 2,121 (2,069)
* Russian 1,851 (1,605)
* Polish 2,016 (1.833)
* Dutch 1,523 (1,280)

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,094  [+289]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 4,150  [+220]
Twitter – followers: 2,912 2,790 [+122]
Correspondents: 844 [+16]
Union group on Flickr: 595 [+2]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 276 [+39]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,743  [+19]
French 2,385 [+37]
Spanish 1,288  [+21]
German 846 [+6]
Italian 532  [+3]
Turkish 515  [+25]
Russian 495 [+9]
Polish 303 [+1]
Chinese 244 [+1]
Portuguese 242 [+4]
Dutch 236 [+3]
Swedish 225 [-2]
Danish 160 [+1]

• I plan to stop allowing participation in our online survey once we have 1,000 responses.  We currently have 978.  Please help by spreading the word.  By the way, the largest groups of survey participants come from the following countries so far: UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Norway.
• UnionBook has now reached over 3,000 members following the push yesterday.  In fact, we’ve picked up 120 new members in the last 9 days.
• We’ll be closing the Vietnam campaign in the next few days.  This will bring us down to only two active campaigns.
• We’ve had a formal request for a campaign from Bangladesh.
• We are expecting additional requests for campaigns in the next few days from Turkey, Japan and Korea.
• I’ll be setting up a French language newswire for the Maghreb countries, as Andy has long proposed.
• I’ve read the Berkman Center (Harvard) report on denial of service attacks on independent media and human rights websites and plan to implement some of their suggestions for improved security in the next few days.  I’ve also written up a short article for the British weekly Solidarity about this.
• I’ve changed the way we backup the site now.  There is now a full weekly backup of our MySQL databases (we didn’t do this before) and instead of packing (zipping) all our other files and backing that up, we’re now backing up all the files on the site on a weekly basis using FTP.
• I have written once again to the domain registrar for the “.tv” domain requesting that they reinstate our labourstart.tv domain.

Today I did a mail blitz to all the above lists –

• Correspondents were given 10 tips and tricks to encourage them to be more active and involved
• UnionBook members were urged to help us recruit the next 28 members to bring the social network up to 3,000 members
• Supporters of our three most recent campaigns on Facebook were encouraged to check out our regular news pages regarding those countries – Vietnam, India and Colombia

Sometime today, we should have our 3,000th member signed up.  I just did a mailing to the existing 2,972 members asking for their help on this.

Comrades in Turkey have offered to host the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference there this year — we are currently in discussions about exactly, when, where and what it will cost.

At Derek’s suggestion, I mailed to a number of our smaller lists to encourage people to take part in our survey of trade  union use of the net, to join our Facebook group, to join UnionBook, and to sign up as correspondents.  Here are the results after three days: Another 149 people filled in the survey; 102 more joined our group on Facebook; 39 signed up to use UnionBook; and 10 volunteered to be LabourStart correspondents.

I attended NetRoots UK last weekend – wasn’t invited to speak, and found only a handful of trade unionists among the hundreds of participants.

At a training session yesterday for activists in the ILO staff union, I showed them traffic statistics for their new website – and we found that every single visitor to the site that day came through a link on LabourStart.  Andrew Casey had posted a link to a news story on their site which was, apparently, being clicked on.