A while ago it was asked 

<https://cs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/484/how-to-increase-our-traffic>?

It seems that we have a steadily growing number of visits recently. At [this site](http://www.quantcast.com/cs.stackexchange.com) I was able to generate a plot of the traffic over time:

![enter image description here][1]

I am interested in the explanation of this graph. First of all, how reliable is this data? And second, what might be a reason for the increased traffic?

* the events at the peeks (whatever happend on Aug 11) ?
* the start of the winter term in most universities?
* did we just reached the critical mass?

Can we learn something from this?



  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/WHl2R.png