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  • Author Author: dougw
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Are Forum Statistics Interesting?

Sports fans everywhere know the attraction of statistics, especially if they are fans of baseball or cricket. In any sport where the action is sporadic, the announcers spend most of the lull time discussing statistics. Broadcasters in most sports employ statisticians to feed the announcers interesting data.

I have noticed that whenever someone takes the initiative to compile some statistics about element14, there is a lot of interest from a significant segment of the membership. It seems to me there is a lot of scope to compile statistics on forum activity and I know it would appeal to some members, me included. I notice Randall publishes some stats about Road Test applications and they are definitely appreciated.

I expect the gamification system automatically generates lots of statistical reports and presumably the forum staff use some of them to gauge performance of various activities, but they are not published for members to see. There are dangers with publishing stats, of course, they may be embarrassing, they may cause unwanted activity that skews the stats, sponsors may not like them to be published, etc.

There lots of potential questions:

  • Is it of interest to publish more stats?
  • How many stats are of interest?
  • Which stats are the most interesting?
  • Which stat would you most like to see?
  • Would you like your own stats to appear in your profile?
  • Would you like to know which are the top 10 most popular blogs of the week or the month?

A single poll cannot answer all questions, so most of these will need to be answered in the comments below.

The one question for the poll is:

Do you think the forum benefits from the publication of stats more than it gets hurt by the same publication?

  • I think the permanent addition of more stats would have more negative impact because they would be too distracting and would be open to different interpretations.  I believe there is value to determine which stats would be good metrics of forum performance and have those stats periodically generated and reviewed by a smaller group of staff and selected members.  That group could then make recommendations changes that might have value.

  • Good on you for asking the hard question.  I'm going with "No".

    It's not that I wouldn't look at them.  I would - sometimes.  "Sometimes" isn't enough to make a person have to compile them monthly for... forever.  I might use them periodically to see what I might be missing.  My concern is that they become white noise or worse, a distractor.

  • I think too much looking at numbers clouds the air and distracts from the comments which provide quality over quantity. Stats remind me of an old saying:

    "Figures never lie, liars figure."

    Clem

  • On a site that is as productive and valuable as this one, if I were a sponsor I'd think that negative stats would definitely help me gauge that my products aren't what we (the designers of products, hobbiests, users) want. It would be a chance to get the feedback to pivot fast (nee The Lean Startup).  Negative stats would help me a lot.

     

     

     

  • I probably look at, and try to read too much into the existing statistics already.  The thing I get the most value from on my posts are the thoughtful comments.  But I can’t help looking at the numbers.

  • in reply to shabaz

    YT algorithm picks the wrong time for an advert placement : )

    image

  • in reply to shabaz

    Good points.

    Stats like the number of views are already shown on every posting. The value and significance of this number is open to interpretation. For example, it may (or may not) be some sort of indicator of popularity. It is probably less of an indicator of quality and effort, but it is there and it is fun to try and figure out how meaningful the number is and what it signifies. If one wants to draw conclusions about whether blogs that have accumulated the most views are different in some way from blogs that don't accumulate lots of views, it is handy if the work of tabulating which blogs received the most views is done by an app on the server, and it saves members from duplicating the work individually, many times over.

    Just to clarify, the poll is not trying to judge whether the stats that are already published, like the number of views, are the best way to track activity, just whether it is a subject of enough interest to members to be worth tabulating.

  • Hi Doug,

     

    Happy new year : )

    That's a lot of check-boxes for the start of the year : ) I think there's a good balance of stats, if there were more I'd probably look at it but maybe not much.. I'd rather look at the techie content..

    I do like adding to the stats with 'like' or 'helpful' since that is more personal, and shows people you appreciate the content you've read. The 'views' stat is less useful I think, because

    some general stats may be deceptive, e.g. some content is popular immediately, other content is 'slow burner' perhaps, and the relevance is more sustained over time maybe?

    I don't know about others, but I try to make my content readable but not specifically for views.. sometimes stuff just has to be written down! It may come in useful later for someone.

    Some of the most-researched content I've written, has just a few hundred views for years, and that's fine by me : ) I'd say it's still useful if people went to the effort to write it and

    genuinely put effort into it rather than a rush-job basically!