How to read a performer's live schedule

You open a performer's profile at nine in the evening, expecting a live room, and find it dark. The profile said they are usually on around this hour. Nothing on the page was wrong, but it was answering a slightly different question from the one you asked. A profile records when someone has been seen, not when they intend to appear.

What "seen" means here

Every few minutes we take a reading: a snapshot of which public rooms are open and how many people are watching each one. A performer is "seen" when their room is public at the moment of a reading. Everything else on the profile is built from those snapshots.

Two consequences follow. First, a short broadcast that starts and ends between two readings can slip past unrecorded. Second, private shows are not counted. When a room goes private it leaves the public list, so to us it looks the same as a room that has closed. A performer working a long private session can therefore appear quieter on paper than they were in fact.

The profile page, field by field

A performer's profile gathers several measures. Each answers its own question.

• Days seen out of the last thirty. How many separate days the performer was seen live in the past thirty. It tells you how regular they are, not how long they stay on.
• Usual hours. The span of the day when they are most often seen, computed from our readings. It appears only once the performer has been seen on a few separate days.
• The 24-hour grid. One cell per hour of the day, shaded by how often they were seen in that hour. It shows the shape of a habit: one long block, two short sessions, or a scatter.
• Days of the week. Which weekdays they have been seen on. Some performers keep a steady weekly pattern; others appear on any day at all.
• Average and peak audience. The typical number of viewers across our readings, and the highest single reading. The average describes an ordinary session; the peak describes an unusual one.

A profile for a newcomer stays nearly empty. That is deliberate. Two sightings are an anecdote, and we would rather leave a blank than print a pattern that is not there.

A habit, not a promise

The usual hours describe the past. They are a fair guide to the future only for as long as the performer keeps the same routine. People change jobs, move house, take holidays and fall ill, and a schedule follows them.

Read the measures together before trusting any one of them:

1. Check the days seen out of the last thirty. A high count means the usual hours rest on many sessions.
2. Look at the 24-hour grid. A tight, dark block suggests a fixed routine; pale cells spread across the day suggest someone who logs on when it suits them.
3. Compare the days of the week. A performer seen only on weekdays may not appear on a Saturday, whatever the usual hours say.
4. Treat a match on all three as a good bet, and a match on one as a guess.

Time zones and daylight saving

Usual hours are converted to your own time zone by your browser. Without JavaScript the page falls back to UTC and labels the hours accordingly. If an hour looks odd, check which of the two you are reading.

Daylight saving adds a twist. A performer who goes live at the same local time all year will appear to shift by an hour in your time zone when either of you changes the clocks. Different countries change on different dates, so for a week or two the gap can move twice. The clock, in other words, is never quite the same clock.

Weekdays, weekends and drift

Many people keep a different rhythm at the weekend, and performers are no exception. The days of the week help here: if the grid shows evening sessions but the weekday chart is weighted toward the weekend, plan for a Saturday rather than a Tuesday.

Schedules also drift. Because the profile is built from recent readings, it updates as the routine changes, but always a little behind. A performer who moved from afternoons to late evenings will show both patterns for a while, then settle into the new one. When the grid shows two separate blocks, the newer habit is often the one that matches recent days.

Reading the wider tide

A single profile tells you about one person. For the whole room list, open a hub page and look at the hourly chart: the average number of rooms in session for each hour of the day, taken over four weeks. It shows when a category is busy and when it goes quiet.

Use the two together. The hourly chart tells you when to look in general; the profile tells you when to look for someone in particular. The directory lists every hub, and the numbers page gathers our figures.