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  • Author Author: dougw
  • Date Created: Date Created
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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?

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  • 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!

  • in reply to shabaz

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

    image

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