For cheap thrills, I entered http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Best%20Nodes into The Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, only five dates came up, as shown below. I added today's "Best Nodes" for comparison:

• Mar 05 2007 Best nodes: month 83-135 votes, year: 121-194 votes
• Oct 10 2007 Best nodes: month 73-105 votes, year: 113-230 votes
• Dec 08 2007 Best nodes: month 71-132 votes, year: 115-238 votes
• Feb 14 2008 Best nodes: month 84-126 votes, year: 111-245 votes
• Apr 24 2008 Best nodes: month 77-111 votes, year: 111-156 votes
• Dec 08 2010 Best nodes: month 42-94 votes, year: 72-144 votes

Based on these numbers (and my own random observations) the voting at Perl Monks seems to have declined considerably, especially in the past year or so. Maybe we lost quite a few users after getting hacked in July 2009?

I guess Stack Overflow also took a considerable amount of traffic, especially of newbies.

http://tanktalus.perlmonk.org/cbstats will be of some interest for the CB related questions.

Filtering all system-like messages from my IRC log from #cbstream - which wasn't connected 100% - I get 451258 lines since 2008-06-25 18:13:19.

That is 111692 in 2008, 183631 in 2009, and 155935 in 2010:

2008-06 =>  2044
2008-07 => 13566
2008-08 => 21279
2008-09 => 23197
2008-10 => 18291
2008-11 => 13474
2008-12 => 19792
2009-01 => 21103
2009-02 => 18631
2009-03 => 19685
2009-04 => 19071
2009-05 => 11834
2009-06 => 12290
2009-07 => 15144
2009-08 => 19563
2009-09 => 13468
2009-10 => 13521
2009-11 =>  8969
2009-12 => 10352
2010-01 => 10397
2010-02 => 12994
2010-03 => 15667
2010-04 => 15115
2010-05 => 11892
2010-06 =>  7966
2010-07 => 14646
2010-08 => 13726
2010-09 => 21651
2010-10 => 17322
2010-11 => 11864
2010-12 =>  2695
[download]

Tinymicros.com used to host stats about this site. See PerlMonks statistics.

Number of people who gave answers

This reply for instance, is not an answer.

My intention was the "replies" just the wording was not correct. Fixing it now.

Javafan ++

This reply for instance, is not an answer.

# Number of Anonymous nodes

should be possible with google sitesearch, grepping date and "by Anonymous monk" and specifiers like in-url: or in-title:

for instance as a start

questions 2010 : 16,900 results

Anonymous questions 2010 : 1,510 results

Number of registered users

Number of Monks by Level

Number of new nodes

What do you mean by "new"? If you just want to know the number of nodes, the node ids are assigned sequentially.

Number of new opening nodes

Again, I don't know what "new" means, so I guess you mean all nodes. You can't easily query this statistics, but I think there's no harm in telling you the counts of root nodes for some sections. (A few sections are omitted on purpose.) The following numbers are current as of this post, will not be updated later, and include unapproved and even reaped nodes.

Seekers of Perl Wisdom

84430

Cool Uses for Perl

1665

Meditations

6453

Perlmonks Discussion

3817

Categorized Questions

790

Tutorial

254

Obfuscated Code

1911

Perl Poetry

1285

Perl News

1729

Module Reviews

147

Book Reviews

150

Craft

275

Code Catacombs

1869

Snippets

2037

Polls

335

Number of Anonymous nodes

This one is easy, you can query the list of all of them on Anonymous Monk's writeups: the count listed is often inaccurate, but you can figure out the exact count by changing the "starting at" field.

Number of page viewers

There used to be some statistics of this at Most Visited Nodes and Yesterday's most-visited nodes, but they don't work anymore, the numbers are stale.

Number of messages in the Chatterbox, number of people who commented in the chatterbox

As mentioned by others, you can get the numbers for a one-week window from mojotoad's cbstats or from Tanktalus' cbstats. If you just want to know the numbers from the start of time, the number of messages might be related to the message ids you can see in the Tickers, but I've no idea if these started from 1, I think they might have been reset once, and I think they include private messages and possibly other things too. As for the number of monks who ever talked in the chatterbox, the gods may be able to extract an approximation for this number by looking at how many users have a last_chatter setting. This setting stores the last line you talked in the chatterbox, so that the site can filter accidental double submits.

Thanks for the data. By "new" I meant new in the last 12 month. In the long run it would be nice to see an ongoing report about the number of nodes create per month. Also the monthly change in the other numbers would be interesting.

If you just need to know the number of nodes in any particular month, you can use Super Search to find the node id of the last node until any date. Most node ids are allocated to actual writeups, whether replies or root nodes: reaped spam nodes are included, and a few new pmdev-only nodes (posts or pmdevnotes). There's no such easy way to find out the number of root nodes (or the number of sopws, that is almost the same number) in a time interval.