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forum join rate

Former Member

On the theory that order rates (which would be nice to know) are

roughly correlated with forum join rates, I used the available raw data at

http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi?view=members

and counted how many pages of members, at 50 members per page,

have joined per week.  I used Wednesday as the starting day of each

week, since the forum started on Wednesday, Feb 29.

 

There are at the moment 5587 members, which makes 112 pages,

with the following distribution by my count, modulo rounding errors.

The first column is the week starting date, the next is the number of

pages (at 50 members/page), the third is the page count times 50.

The last week isn't a full week.

 

feb 29      71    3550

mar 07       8      400

mar 14       5      250

mar 21       5      250

mar 28       6      300

apr 04        3      150

apr 11        6      300

apr 18        4      200

apr 25        4      200

 

I speculate that for every forum member, there have been about 20 Farnell orders,

based on 100,000+ orders for 5000+ members.

  • If you prefer not counting pages, the top Element14 RasPi page http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi does list the number of members (currently 5594) next to the Members button.

     

    Interesting numbers, but I'm not sure what one can conclude.  I would guess that the top number 3550 on 29 Feb is mostly due to the raspberrypi.org forum's blackout when people had to go elsewhere to get any data as to what was going on.  Who knows how many of them continued to visit here once raspberrypi.org came back, and how many potential Element14 members don't bother to sign up here, preferring to ask questions at raspberrypi.org.

     

    Personally, I find both sites interesting.  Ironically, now that people have RasPi units I see fewer interesting "Educational Applications" posts at raspberrypi.org and find more interesting education discussion (especially regarding FPGAs) here at Element14.

  • Always nice to have a reason to run gnuplot .... image

     

    image

  • in reply to morgaine

    Very nice :-)

     

    I also expect another spike when these things start getting delivered in volume, as the information here seems better arranged than on the Foundation sites, the Forum is quite difficult for someone new to all this to find information on, and the Wiki is still in quite early days.

     

    I'm guessing as above, the huge start is when the Foundation site went into blackout. That is when I found this forum and haven't looked back since :-)

  • in reply to GreenYamo

    yes, very nice graph.  thanks!

     

    We heard recently that there may be another 70K or so orders,

    so that may require some readjustment when the figures are more firm.

    Since the last week of data is a partial week, that may also indicate

    an uptick in the data.  Otherwise the data looks pretty flat after the first

    week or so, with an estimated order rate of about 5K units per week.

     

    It will be interesting to see if membership does rise with volume shipments.

    It seems quite a large fraction of new users are reporting problems. 

    Even the press-review copies, such as the BBC one,  which came with

    pre-installed software, reported that the first python demo program

    caused a hard crash requiring reboot.

     

    I find it surprising that there is no issue-tracker database, either here or

    at RPi.org.  The troubleshooting forum is helpful, but as issues get fixed,

    you'd like to get them out of the way so you can easily see what the open

    issues are.  But then I find a lot of things surprising, such as no meaningful

    beta testing ...

  • in reply to Former Member

    @coder27: +1 for the "issue tracker database" idea.

     

    I suppose we could post the suggestion on the Rpi forum.  Although unfortunately the fanbois will consider it criticism and come out in force like a rabid bunch of hyenas.  Not worth the agro.

  • in reply to morgaine

    It has been suggested.  Read this thread and weep: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum/features-and-requests/wherehow-to-submit-bug-reports

     

    JamesH wrote: "As the Raspi is perfect in every way, I think that will be fine.  image "

     

  • in reply to morgaine

    Very nice graph!  I'm working with gnuplot myself at the moment for a project image  I had been kind of of cheating with qgfe as a front end which is nice for zooming in and out but now I need to automate the process of creating graph images with a script.

  • in reply to fustini

    Sounds interesting, Drew.

     

    I use gnuplot so infrequently that on every occasion I have to relearn it afresh.  But it's always fun to use. image

     

    Graphs in general take me back to my engineering roots, so I've always enjoyed them.  Most of the time I only work with MRTG ones though for monitoring network resources, so it's pretty boring.