This is more a suggestion for Brian, asking whether this is at all feasible, but it is worthy of a discussion..

We get regular IRC stats for the #massassi chatroom and they are most excellent, and I was wondering if we could get something similar for the forums. Anything too extensive would probably put a lot of stress on the server, but some sort of postcount statistic should be possible. Once every week or month, the server saves a copy of the current postcount of every member to some text file or database. Perhaps not every member, there seems to be a lot of them, but perhaps every member that was active that week or month. This would only put stress on the server once every week or month, and it would be a while before the database gets particularly large, and it would produce some interesting statistics - who was most active in that week, who has the most posts in total, who has increased in activity the most, who has dissapeared off the face of Massassi - and best of all, we can draw GRAPHS.

It's certainly possible to do this client-side, scouring every post in the last week or month and saving the postcounts of every user, but that would be terribly inefficient and doing it server-side must be more efficient. I also imagine the server wouldn't be too pleased with such a huge number of requests coming from one client.

But anyway, is this remotely possible, am I the only one fascinated by statistics, is there such a system already in place and I have made myself an utter fool?

Speak!

That post-snailrace taken literally?

Bad idea. We already have enough people focused around post counts. Making a system that would glorify the high-posters would be quite a problem.

I think this could be a cool idea, but then with random quotes, question/statement ration, etc etc ... (~chat stats). Intergalactically useless, but still a nice feature.

If they enabled the memberlist you could see the top whatever posters.

Which is exactly why I think it's off :p

I think it'd just depress the new members.

Knowing when the forums are most active might be interesting, as well as average word count per post... <_<

Statistics are available on the Admin CP. But its very server-intensive to compile them. This is the same reason the member list is disabled... the forums would run incredibly slowly eveytime someone looked at it. In fact, 9 times out of 10, if the forums appear slow, its because a single Admin is running some query or another on the cp.

So just post em once a month or something. I imagine quite a few people would get a kick out of it.

Seems like a crazy idea.
But go for it.

I don't like posting our member numbers or a list of all our members, that's why I turned stats reporting and the member list off.

I also removed stats reporting because it slows down the whole forum.

I don't get what the fascination is with stats anyway - is that some way to tell the quality of discussion in our forums? ahem

Yeah, GBK's ePenis wouldn't fit through the door anymore.

It's not about postcount per se, and considering that the person who comes in at #1 in the #massassi stats is generally considered rather sad (yeah, I was up there for a good number of weeks once!), it could have the opposite effect and deter the spammers. Also, chat-like stats would be cool - when are forums most active, how much activity on each forum, random quotes... also a quotes page for the forums may cool, considering all the amusing stuff in the current quotes thread.

Having said all that, DS has just told us it's way too server-intensive. So

It wouldn't be all that hard to write a few queries that compiled some data. You run that every week when the forum is quiet and save it into a table. Then the stats page isn't running the intensive queries each time it's viewed, but running a simple SELECT on the compiled data.

So from a database load point of view, it can be done with minimal disruption - especially after the first time where you could figure out when the forum is least active.

Is that recompiling the whole thing whenever anyone loads it? Because real-time stats wouldn't be necessary at all. As various people have suggested, just compile them once a month and put the data up on some page. I'm sure that can't be too server-intensive, and if it is we could probably place limits on who enters the statistics to lighten the load. Would this not be possible?

It seems to me that Evil_Gir (lovely as he is) has offered to do all the nasty working things out bit.

Actually, all I said was it would be technically feasible to do it. I made no comment on a) whether it'd be worth the bother, b) what you'd measure if you could be bothered or c) whether I personally could be bothered.

:p

I say nay to the stats.
Reasons:

• What Brian and DSettahr said.
• Not really useful/important. To be honest, I'm not sure why we have chat stats. Stats are only good for statisticians.

Quanity is job #1.

Statisticians and nerds. Infact, statisticians = nerds. and we have lots of nerds here.

And Giraffe, don't even try it. I have witnesses. You volunteered.

(why am I even arguing this? it's not even close to being up to me)