Figure 4: Number of first visits to confluence points each month in the world, Usa and russia.

Even though the total number of visits hasn’t changed, progress towards the project goal has in fact slowed down. After taking revisits out of the statistic in Figure 1, we find that the actual rate of first conquers has halved within the last 5 years. Figure 3 shows that more and more postings tend to be revisits – bringing the fraction of first visits down to 30% from initially 100%.

Figure 5: Fraction of visited confluences in some selected countries.

The project progress differs largely in from country to country. As can be seen from Figure 4 and 5, initially all of the world’s first visits had been occurred in the USA. The passion for confluencing reached Europe in 2001 and Russia in summer 2004. From Figure 5 it is witnessed how quickly Germany (as a comparatively small country) was captured almost totally within one single year. The USA still remains 25% incomplete due to remote Alaska. Densely populated countries such as China and India find more and more enthusiasts –now being finalised by 40% they have overtaken the world average in terms of reaching completeness. However, huge remote unpopulated areas such as the Himalaya region in China and the Siberian tundra in Russia will prevent

Figure 6: total number of visits each day of the week.

those countries completion for quite a while. Confluencing tends to be a hobby for the weekend when twice as many visits occur compared to weekdays, see Figure 6.