Lancia Motor Club

General => General Chat => Topic started by: simonandjuliet on 16 June, 2016, 08:54:38 PM



Title: More stats
Post by: simonandjuliet on 16 June, 2016, 08:54:38 PM
From time to time I check out the "more stats" page on the forum, usually to remind me how much time I should NOT be spending here .....

One of the more interesting sections is the Forum History, because I think this gives a real idea as to to "how alive" the forum is. Plus it makes me wonder why some months we have as may as 900 topics and other months as few as 260. It shows up anomalies - why did we get nearly 3000 new members in March/April 3013 ?

It is difficult to see change/anomolies with lists of figures, and this will get more difficult as we add data - could we represent this section in graph form instead ?

Whilst on this subject, "the topics by views" is very heavily influenced by a couple of topics that makes the rest of the list irrelevant to most of us. Is it possible to show "trending" instead ? IE to demonstrate some sort of change in the way we are looking at things, rather than absolute numbers ?

Please note that these are not criticisms, especially since I have no idea as to what it takes to produce these stats in the first place, just ideas for "enhancements" !


Title: Re: More stats
Post by: lancialulu on 16 June, 2016, 10:25:10 PM
Clearly stats are living up to their reputation of being worse than demned lies. (3000 members......)


Title: Re: More stats
Post by: sparehead3 on 17 June, 2016, 10:58:49 AM
Hi Simon

The stats are collected by the Forum software , they're not something we have written and it's not something we can change - if you look for "SMF statistics collection" on Google that would give you all the technical detail I'm sure ( I've not looked :) )

The Topic views are skewed because some areas are public which means that search engines will look at them. So if you were to put Lancia Stratos for Sale then this will ( probably )  be viewed lots of times because it's something searched for a lot on Google and Google reads our forum*

As for the 3,000 new members, this may be back when we stopped online registration and went to people emailing form admin - we were suffering from a lot of automated registrations that were having to be cancelled. Going to emails meant that only real people were likely to do this ( and this works fine - you see us announcing new members ).

Looking at the number of posts, it may be that more happens on the forum in winter that in the summer months - or did I just have a quick look and jump to conclusions :) - I also had a look a Trending - but can't see anything so I think that is a no-go.

 *Apologies to anyone not from the LMC who has just been directed here by Google who was looking to buy this model of  car ...

****

I've done a similar thing with a spreadsheet containing members by region by join/leave date so that it's easy to see how the membership has altered over time at a very granular level - this too suffers a large spike in 1990 and this is because the original computer system gave a membership start date of 1990 and not their actual start date :)

****

For anyone who hasn't looked at the stats page , it's here http://www.lancia.myzen.co.uk/forum/index.php?action=stats


Title: Re: More stats
Post by: simonandjuliet on 17 June, 2016, 07:28:49 PM
Thanks Steve

I shall continue to use the stats to remind me how many other things I should be doing instead of posting on the forum (only joking !)


Title: Re: More stats
Post by: stanley sweet on 20 June, 2016, 08:57:36 AM
How do I get into the Members Database? My LMC site password doesn't work for it.