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Community Question Answering (CQA) sites, now navigating through millions of daily user visits, hinge significantly on the quality of user-generated questions to bolster user satisfaction and, consequently, website traffic – crucial for platform sustainability. While the quality of questions ostensibly sets the stage for insightful answers, thereby attracting substantial traffic, existing research has predominantly sidelined the significance of questions, favoring a focus on traditional factors, such as answer quality, to elucidate traffic determinants. In this study we quantified the interrelation between question quality and traffic by extracting 15 relevant question-quality features and corresponding traffic (i.e. pageview) data from a leading Chinese CQA platform. Utilizing Grey Relational Analysis, we assessed these attributes’ relative influence on pageviews and created a ranking list of features of questions. Based on the rankings, our findings spotlight the paramount influence of a question's digital popularity and attributes tied to the questioner – central pillars of social features – surpassing the impact of textual elements. This study further delineates the underlying reasons for such patterns based on traffic sourced from diverse channels. Our revelations offer pivotal insights for optimizing CQA platform engagement and furnish avenues for prospective research.

This study aims to examine the public values, usability, and readability attributes of national level e-government Websites in Turkey. The Website analysis included 112 sites in the E-Government Gateway. The Websites were evaluated on the basis of public values aspects of accessibility, public participation, trust and legitimacy (i.e., transparency/openness and security/privacy), dialogue, service delivery quality, and accountability. The research also aims to examine the usability of Turkey's national Websites and assess their usability using online diagnostic methods. The pages are evaluated according to a selection of usability criteria: bounce rate, design optimization, download time, Google page rank, markup validation, mobile accountability, page size, response time, traffic rank (Turkey), and traffic rank (Global). Lastly, three most popular readability measures, Flesch–Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, and Gunning Fog Index have been used to assess readability of national level Turkish government Websites. Results reveal that the situation in Turkey is far from satisfying with regards to overall performance of e-government services. Additionally, the results of this study depicted that the usability and performance criteria are neglected in these Websites. Lastly, the study also revealed readability and security vulnerabilities in the Websites. The findings of the study have critical theoretical, practical, and policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The use of online tools is a common practice for evaluating the accessibility of a website, identifying problems, and providing useful feedback on how to fix detected issues. For ease of accessibility validation, many tools have been developed and implemented successfully over the years. Yet, the results of these tools show differences in terms of coverage, correctness, and reporting-related issues. In this study, we compared online accessibility evaluation tools to understand to what extent they differ in detecting accessibility problems in websites. A total of 41 government websites of different countries were tested for violations of accessibility guidelines using six evaluation tools. We observed that each tool generated different evaluation data for the same websites. As some of the tools are complementary to each other, meaning the highest coverage and completeness can be possible with the right combination of evaluation tools. Therefore, we suggest different tools should be utilized to provide consistency and obtain reliable data from online evaluation tools, thereby improving tool effectiveness.

Our reliance on the internet increases daily as it depends on the number of services implemented on the internet. With the growth of internet usage dramatically increasing, more users feel the need to explore and utilize it to the fullest. The only way the typical user would be able to access the WWW by using a web browser; hence, the creation of numerous web browsers in the past decade. However, websites are significantly slowed down and websites frequently take a few seconds to fully load.. This is worrisome because slow performance can cause users to leave a loading page, lower search engine rankings, and other negative effects. The purpose of this paper is to compare and evaluate the performance of five commonly used browsers, which are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Brave. The comparison will include CPU, RAM, and GPU usage using Speedometer and MotionMark benchmark tools, which come with the high-performing browsers. The results of this study reveal that Chrome utilizes more CPU and Memory but economically utilizes GPU power. In contrast, Microsoft Edge utilizes CPU and RAM memory economically but uses the GPU more freely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Taiwan’s colleges and universities are struggling to maintain their student enrollment rates owing to the declining fertility rate. Focusing on students in higher education programs, this study aims to analyze online behavioral patterns for university departmental websites and accordingly, suggests response strategies to increase the rate of enrollment. Methods We use Google Analytics to examine the websites of two departments in a medical university between February 1 and July 30, 2018. We study website patterns during the study periods for three college admission routes: STARS program, personal applications, and admission through examination and placement. Results Most website visitors during the three visiting date ranges for the two departments are 18–24 years. The visitor groups are mainly freshmen at the university and their parents. The homepage and Subject Credits, Course Planning, Teacher Lineup, and Certificate of Subjects were the most visited webpages. The overall number of daily page views varied by academic event. Conclusions University departments should enhance the presentation of featured courses on their webpage or distinguish course characteristics from those of competing departments in the curriculum to ensure clear market segmentation. In addition, departments should consider examining online data to identify suitable high schools that can be visited to attract potential students and to improve students’ willingness to choose their university.

Studies about the theory of religious image and visual pragmatics consider that nowadays the practice of “image-assisted devotion” has fallen into disuse and, therefore, images for affective purposes between human beings and deities are no longer in use. As the Internet is considered the new space where cultural dynamics are created, this article traces within the Lindsay Lohan’s Last Fan web performance (2012-2014) if these visual needs have been extinguished. Using as an analytical tool the procedure of imageassisted meditation: –contemplation, edification, empathy, and imitation– similarities are discovered regarding the devotional process. The search for contact with ineffable entities persists but with different images, referents, genres, and ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to explore the relationship between human development index (HDI) of countries and level of web accessibility and quality in use of their municipality websites. A list of 146 countries was obtained from the 2016 Global Human Development Report of the United Nations. Of these countries, 49 had a very high HDI, 42 had a high HDI, 33 had a medium HDI, and 22 had a low HDI. For the analysis of web accessibility and quality in use, the official municipality websites of capital cities of each country were found. These websites were tested using automated evaluation tools. The results showed that the global rank of municipality websites, their rank within the country of location, and percentage of incoming traffic within the country of location varied depending on their HDI. Furthermore, the number of websites that passed all WCAG 2.0 success criteria was very low. The analysis on whether the number of accessibility errors in the evaluated websites changed according to the country's HDI showed that for conformance level A, representing the "must satisfy" checkpoints, the difference was significant. The municipality websites had fewer errors in countries with a higher HDI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Many common document formats on the Internet are text‐only such as email (MIME) and the Web (HTML, JavaScript, JSON, and XML). To include images or executable code in these documents, we first encode them as text using base64. Standard base64 encoding uses 64 ASCII characters, ie, both lower and upper case Latin letters, digits and two other symbols. We show how we can encode and decode base64 data at nearly the speed of a memory copy (memcpy) on recent Intel processors, as long as the data does not fit in the first‐level (L1) cache. We use the single‐instruction‐multiple‐data instruction set AVX‐512 available on commodity processors. Our implementation generates several times fewer instructions than previous single‐instruction‐multiple‐data‐accelerated base64 codecs. It is also more versatile, as it can be adapted, even at runtime, to any base64 variant by only changing constants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing web applications and services have historically been implemented using JavaScript. However, new technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Big Data are being developed as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. With the definition of the HTML5 web standard, services (such as the technologies mentioned above) that were previously not available through the Web become available. These services, however, need to have the same performance as native applications, and implementing these services will require new technologies. Therefore, additional tools that can work on the Web with native performance are needed. In this paper, a system for branching processing was established using JavaScript and WebAssembly, a language that can operate on the Web. This system performs user requests in advance, and requests are branched in a language that produces faster results. Therefore, a service capable of quick response times can be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents Webget, a measurement tool that measures Web quality of service (QoS) metrics, including the DNS lookup time, time to first byte (TTFB), and the download time. Webget also captures Web complexity metrics, such as the number and the size of objects that make up the website. We deploy the Webget test to measure the Web performance of Google, YouTube, and Facebook from 182 SamKnows probes. Using a 3.5-year-long (January 2014–July 2017) dataset, we show that the DNS lookup time of these popular content delivery networks (CDNs) and the download time of Google have improved over time. We also show that the TTFB toward Facebook exhibits worse performance than the Google CDN. Moreover, we show that the number and the size of objects are not the only factors that affect the Web download time. We observe that these webpages perform differently across regions and service providers. We also developed a Web measurement system, Web performance and rendering (WePR) that measures the same Web QoS and complexity metrics as Webget, but it also captures the Web quality of experience metrics, such as rendering time. WePR has a distributed architecture where the component that measures the Web QoS and complexity metrics is deployed on the SamKnows probe, while the rendering time is calculated on a central server. We measured the rendering performance of four websites. We show that in 80% of the cases, the rendering time of the websites is faster than the downloading time. The source code of the WePR system and the dataset is made publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web developers use base64 formats to include images, fonts, sounds, and other resources directly inside HTML, JavaScript, JSON, and XML files. We estimate that billions of base64 messages are decoded every day. We are motivated to improve the efficiency of base64 encoding and decoding. Compared to state-ofthe- art implementations, we multiply the speeds of both the encoding (≈ 10×) and the decoding (≈ 7×). We achieve these good results by using the single-instruction-multiple-data instructions available on recent Intel processors (AVX2).Our accelerated software abides by the specification and reports errors when encountering characters outside of the base64 set. It is available online as free software under a liberal license. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important that university websites and services offered through their sites are used effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily by the whole target group of the university, including disabled users. However, universities in many countries are still unable to meet the criteria for web accessibility. This study aimed to test the websites of the top universities in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkey using automated assessment tools. The results showed that university websites are more popular in Turkey, and in Turkish universities developers pay more attention to the performance of websites, followed by websites of Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz and Kazakh universities. The majority of the university websites in the study did not meet the WCAG 2.0 accessibility criteria. Only two Kyrgyz and two Kazakh university websites attained conformance level A, and only three, one Kyrgyz and two Kazakh, achieved accessibility conformance level AAA. Based on the results, it was determined that universities included in the present study need to devote more effort to making their websites more accessible for their users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responsiveness is a critical metric for web performance. Recent work in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has resulted in a new set of web protocols, including definition of the hypertext transfer protocol version 2 (HTTP/2) and a corresponding set of TCP updates. Together, these have been designed to reduce the web page download latency compared with HTTP/1.1. This paper describes the main features of the new protocols and discusses the impact of path delay on their expected performance. It then presents a set of tests to evaluate whether current implementations of the new protocols can offer benefit with an operational satellite access network and suggests how the specifications can evolve and be tuned to further enhance performance for long network paths. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The learning process, among its different phases, involves monitoring of users behaviour in order to extract knowledge. Details about users have significant weight to understand the interests and intentions and produce forward-looking statements, as well as keep track of the learning management system (LMS). In this work, a model to investigate and predict the behavior of users, taken to explore the additional knowledge information and predict the learning outcomes, is described. In the first instance, the information are extracted through a suitable tool, and, subsequently, are submitted to an analysis phase. Time series analysis techniques are adopted to detect partial similarities between the navigation data and, subsequently, to extract a classification. Finally, performance are measured through statistical measures to evaluate the goodness of proposed approach and test its significance. The results, obtained on Moodle platform, show that the proposed model leads to accurate outcome prediction about users behavior and can be adopted to improve the learning paths, both in its implementation and design.

Government Web sites aim to provide information to the citizens of the country; therefore, they should be accessible, easy to use and visible via search engines. Based on this assumption, in this paper, the ministry Web sites of four countries namely the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Republic of Turkey were analyzed in terms of accessibility and quality in use. Tests were carried out utilizing online automated tools. Results indicate that the usage rate of Information and Communication Technologies by the government is higher in Turkey, which affects the visibility of government Web sites but not their quality in use. Very few ministry Web sites of the four countries achieved AA conformance level on accessibility, many failed to pass conformance level A and AA checkpoints for accessibility errors. In order to ensure equal access to all their citizens, the countries in this study need to put more emphasis on designing government Web sites to be more accessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current wireless Internet environment, using a mobile device to quickly access a web site is closely related to measuring the performance of a website. When accessing a website, the user has a long time to access the website and has no access to the website.In this case, the performance of the web site should be improved by measuring and analyzing the performance of the connection delay due to a problem of the web site.Among the performance measurement factors of Web sites, Web page loading time is a very important factor for a successful service business in the situation where most of e-commerce business is being developed as a web-based service.An open source tool was analyzed to analyze the performance of the e-commerce web page to present problems, software optimization methods and hardware optimization methods. Applying two optimization methods to suit the environment will enable stable and e-commerce websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The learning process, among its different phases, involves monitoring of users behaviour in order to extract knowledge. Details about users have significant weight to understand the interests and intentions and produce forward-looking statements, as well as keep track of the learning management system (LMS). In this work, a model to investigate and predict the behavior of users, taken to explore the additional knowledge information and predict the learning outcomes, is described. In the first instance, the information are extracted through a suitable tool, and, subsequently, are submitted to an analysis phase. Time series analysis techniques are adopted to detect partial similarities between the navigation data and, subsequently, to extract a classification. Finally, performance are measured through statistical measures to evaluate the goodness of proposed approach and test its significance. The results, obtained on Moodle platform, show that the proposed model leads to accurate outcome prediction about users behavior and can be adopted to improve the learning paths, both in its implementation and design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, benefits and advantages arising from virtualization technologies, applied to the field of distance education, are discussed and highlighted. Moodle, the most widely used Learning Management System, and a virtualization system, based on Xen hypervisor, are combined in order to create an effective e-learning environment. Commonly, the main problem about Moodle concerns the server workload, due to several factors, which results in a saturation of physical devices. To bypass this limit, the over-centralized load is deployed on a dynamic virtual machine. Experimental results prove that the proposed system can improve performances, produce low connection time and provide a good distance education environment.