What is the most active Forum? (Warning: no photos, can be boring)

Thanks Sam, I was about to post this link, but your concrete explanation is closer to Forums.

Next I probably need to analyze how the length of the title impacts the view/reply activity.

Regarding glam&nude, here is one more example from today's stats.

Ahhh.... another economist Are you studying or working?

Another interesting topic to analyse would be the effect of putting your title in all upper case. Some people seem to do it in order to gain attention for their thread and I've often wondered how much difference it actually makes.

Interesting stats..

Big_B wrote:
What about endogeneity problems? Doesn't this tell you what type of photos you ought to be taking if you want to get responses, rather than where the photo should be posted?

Quite the contrary. I feel that the neglected forum areas should be hyped up in some way so people will feel more encouraged to add more items to these areas instead of everyone taking pictures of the same type of theme eg/ macros of flowers. I guess there's going to be less people who are going to experiment with black and white photos etc but not a lot you can do about that.

I hope i'm not missing a point here.. lol. I know I try to cover all the areas and post comments on almost any pictures.

You forgot a graph showing the most active members in the foum.. That would be intersting.


Remember, 5/4 people are not too good with graphs.

Do you also have views split by members and non-members? Would be interesting to see which forums are viewed most by non-members.

I love such analysis. I would never have guessed 'people' to be at the top. Had always thought 'lenses' was... Great work Olli

I don't disagree, I was just talking about what the stats show, rather than what we should be doing. By the way have you looked in on the Other forum recently? We have a few really interesting stickies going.

Big_B wrote:
Ahhh.... another economist Are you studying or working?

Another interesting topic to analyse would be the effect of putting your title in all upper case. Some people seem to do it in order to gain attention for their thread and I've often wondered how much difference it actually makes.

Hehheh ... years fly, I'm an old f*rt and studies are somewhere in the shadows of the history ...

A quick and dirty answer to Sam's hypothesis: correlation coefficient between uppercase letters in the title and number of views in yesterday's sample of 500 data pairs was -0.02 (for the length of the title that was 0.01), so *shouting* seems not to help to gain attention but I need to have a second look on the raw data, i'm afraid there are data points which might create a biased result.

kram wrote:
Do you also have views split by members and non-members? Would be interesting to see which forums are viewed most by non-members.

I love such analysis. I would never have guessed 'people' to be at the top. Had always thought 'lenses' was... Great work Olli

Thanks Kram. I don't have access to this split data (or do I?), but certainly an interesting topic as well.

Btw, yesterday the top 5 forums, based on the same calculation method as last week were

Canon EF and EF-S lenses
General chat
Canon EOS digital cameras
Transportation
Macro

People Forum was 7th. obviously this sample of 500 is not representative enough. This means more work to me ... huh ...

Well, I could give you e.g. one year of thread view/title/forum data, all I need is to write a script for it. But my time is now limited so if you can do php and mysql grab a vbulletin and go for it

Of course all reports would have to pass though the office so they would always be positive

Olli wrote:
A quick and dirty answer to Sam's hypothesis: correlation coefficient between uppercase letters in the title and number of views in yesterday's sample of 500 data pairs was -0.02 (for the length of the title that was 0.01), so *shouting* seems not to help to gain attention but I need to have a second look on the raw data, i'm afraid there are data points which might create a biased result.

That is a facinating result. I'd be interested to hear an update when you've had chance to go through it in more detail.

Pekka wrote:
Well, I could give you e.g. one year of thread view/title/forum data, all I need is to write a script for it. But my time is now limited so if you can do php and mysql grab a vbulletin and go for it

Of course all reports would have to pass though the office so they would always be positive

Aaah, this is getting serious. Pekka's proposal is tempting, as I'm planning to take my first infantile steps towards the unknown world of mySQL. But as the bread and butter is coming from other sources, I also need to put a limit somewhere.

Still, as long as the office allows, I might post some more complitely insignificant views to the behaviour of Forum members. Soon I have to take a short break, but before that a quick view to the lengths of the threads.

Top three in average length of the title of the threads (last Monday) were

* Exhibit Engine discussion (need to be long as topic is so difficult?)
* Canon G-series digital cameras (hardware guys like to be exact?)
* Forum Talk (talk, talk, talk?)

Shortest titles were in

* Critique Corner (hit me?)
* Glamour & Nude (less words, more pics?)
* Other (?)

Questions: Is there a deeper meening in this? Will the mankind get better after knowing this? Which was first, chicken or egg?

Here is a graph (edit: in this updated graph special marks have been counted separately).

I'd think you guys were all nuts, except that I once wrote a Perl script to access all the forums and get post/view/reply counts... Olli, can you do Perl? The scripts would need some tweaking.

Olli, your work is admirable considering you did all that manually. A few basic sql queries will parse all of this out instantly though, hopefully pekka writes it up for you to save some time on all of that. Your graphs are very cool

Can not agree more

Would love but, sorry, can not

ericgtr wrote:
Olli, your work is admirable considering you did all that manually. A few basic sql queries will parse all of this out instantly though, hopefully pekka writes it up for you to save some time on all of that. Your graphs are very cool

Thanks Eric for the compliment. If Pekka just will have time to write the scrip, and I can get the data, I might promise to have a new wierd look for the stats(published only after The Office' formal approval ).

Btw, there are more moderators' than members' comments (12 vs. 7, I did not count myself) on this thread [Shivering].

If it's one thing they have around here it's a great bunch of mods who are hands on and helpful all over the place.