[META] MGSA Stats
I decided to put together some stats on MGSA, for no particular reason other than I like data.
Let's first look at users.
There are a total of 2369 users accounts. That number does not take into account users that have been deleted/banned/etc. I could take a naive guess at how many total lifetime registrations there have been by simply looking at the highest user ID (around 8150), but it is possible that the forum software decides to pad ID's, so that is likely inaccurate.
The most popular day to create a MGSA account is Monday, and clearly people don't like creating accounts with a hangover on Saturday.
The biggest month for registrations was January 2015. I'm sure someone will point what happened there, but here are my guesses:
1) People are getting tired of breaking their "get fit" new years resolutions, so decided to make and break a "start making games" resolution.
2) Glitch in the matrix?
3) MGSA advertised how rich you get making games.
Overall, users are fairly active. I define "active" as having visited the site an average of once per week since registering. Because that is fairly stringent (people go on holiday and stuff), 10% seems reasonable.
The following users are the most thanked/liked/helpful:
@dislekcia, @EvanGreenwood, @Tuism, @Elyaradine, @dammit, @Fengol, @TheFuntastic, @Bensonance, @LexAquillia, @Karuji.
And the most active users are:
@Bensonance, @farsicon, @Fengol, @Elyaradine, @Tuism, @FanieG, @Zaphire, @MCA, @Sash, @Rigormortis
...where active is determined by how often a user who has been registered for > 6 months visits the site.
OK, now onto threads and comments/posts.
Here are the users that have created the most threads, along with how many threads they create on average per day.
And the users that have commented the most.
The days when people like creating threads matches the registration graph really closely.
And posting within those threads matches almost exactly.
This sort of tells us that no matter what people do on the site, their schedule is roughly consistent.
People like posting comments between lunch and early evening. They also seem to have hits of inspiration around 1am, but are almost totally oriented horizontally by 6am.
In terms of general creation of threads, people went on holiday (?) over December 2013 and 2015, but seemed to avoid awkward family gatherings in December 2014.
Comments over that time roughly match.
But it gets interesting when we put the above two items together and work out comments per thread.
This shows that the threads people were creating over this passed December were not very interesting and didn't get many responses, but are quickly getting more interesting in February.
Finally, the most popular word (excluding common stop words) is game. Shock and awe!
The top three most popular words sort of describe MGSA: GAMES AND MORE GAMES!
And just for fun, some of the least used words (1 use each): velddrif, multijammer, cooperatively, loitering, hawaii, corporeally.
Wow: corporeally, adverb: of the nature of the physical body; bodily.
p.s. Although I'm fairly sure that the data is correct, there is a chance my code did something wrong. If my code was always flawless I probably would have shipped my game by now.
Also, I gathered the data over large periods of time (and mostly after midnight) and didn't do any fun parallel stuff in case MGSA was hosted on a RaspberriPi over ISDN.
Let's first look at users.
There are a total of 2369 users accounts. That number does not take into account users that have been deleted/banned/etc. I could take a naive guess at how many total lifetime registrations there have been by simply looking at the highest user ID (around 8150), but it is possible that the forum software decides to pad ID's, so that is likely inaccurate.
The most popular day to create a MGSA account is Monday, and clearly people don't like creating accounts with a hangover on Saturday.
The biggest month for registrations was January 2015. I'm sure someone will point what happened there, but here are my guesses:
1) People are getting tired of breaking their "get fit" new years resolutions, so decided to make and break a "start making games" resolution.
2) Glitch in the matrix?
3) MGSA advertised how rich you get making games.
Overall, users are fairly active. I define "active" as having visited the site an average of once per week since registering. Because that is fairly stringent (people go on holiday and stuff), 10% seems reasonable.
The following users are the most thanked/liked/helpful:
@dislekcia, @EvanGreenwood, @Tuism, @Elyaradine, @dammit, @Fengol, @TheFuntastic, @Bensonance, @LexAquillia, @Karuji.
And the most active users are:
@Bensonance, @farsicon, @Fengol, @Elyaradine, @Tuism, @FanieG, @Zaphire, @MCA, @Sash, @Rigormortis
...where active is determined by how often a user who has been registered for > 6 months visits the site.
OK, now onto threads and comments/posts.
Here are the users that have created the most threads, along with how many threads they create on average per day.
And the users that have commented the most.
The days when people like creating threads matches the registration graph really closely.
And posting within those threads matches almost exactly.
This sort of tells us that no matter what people do on the site, their schedule is roughly consistent.
People like posting comments between lunch and early evening. They also seem to have hits of inspiration around 1am, but are almost totally oriented horizontally by 6am.
In terms of general creation of threads, people went on holiday (?) over December 2013 and 2015, but seemed to avoid awkward family gatherings in December 2014.
Comments over that time roughly match.
But it gets interesting when we put the above two items together and work out comments per thread.
This shows that the threads people were creating over this passed December were not very interesting and didn't get many responses, but are quickly getting more interesting in February.
Finally, the most popular word (excluding common stop words) is game. Shock and awe!
The top three most popular words sort of describe MGSA: GAMES AND MORE GAMES!
And just for fun, some of the least used words (1 use each): velddrif, multijammer, cooperatively, loitering, hawaii, corporeally.
Wow: corporeally, adverb: of the nature of the physical body; bodily.
p.s. Although I'm fairly sure that the data is correct, there is a chance my code did something wrong. If my code was always flawless I probably would have shipped my game by now.
Also, I gathered the data over large periods of time (and mostly after midnight) and didn't do any fun parallel stuff in case MGSA was hosted on a RaspberriPi over ISDN.
MostUsedWords.PNG
679 x 405 - 16K
Posts.PNG
864 x 463 - 20K
PostsPerDay.PNG
687 x 454 - 10K
PostsPerThread.PNG
855 x 466 - 22K
RegistrationsByMonth.PNG
866 x 400 - 23K
RegistrationsPerDay.PNG
632 x 371 - 9K
ThreadCreationPerDay.PNG
688 x 447 - 10K
Threads.PNG
864 x 457 - 25K
TimeOfPostsComments.PNG
755 x 489 - 12K
users.PNG
583 x 343 - 9K
MostThreadsCreated.PNG
1111 x 625 - 39K
MostComments.PNG
1104 x 619 - 33K
Thanked by 11electrov dammit farsicon francoisvn Sash Elyaradine Tuism mattbenic Kobusvdwalt9 FanieG MCA
Comments
One rather simple stat you seemed to miss (perhaps for a reason I'm not aware of): top users by number of posts
Something else I'd be interested to see: number of posts per thread depending on when the thread is created. Intuition says this shouldn't matter, but maybe threads started on Monday or early in the morning get more replies?
Another metric you could measure is the number of views a thread gets. It might correlate pretty strongly with number of posts in the thread, but maybe it's more interesting...
When searching the site, it seems the post was removed. All the other words used just once turn up in Google search.
But why would someone remove such a (presumably) magnificent post? Has the post been removed in response to the word's usage on this forum being exposed?
Added - search for "users that have created the most threads" above. I forgot to grab the number of views. Will see if I can find something interesting :)
It happened just a few days ago via @MCA 's fingers:
http://makegamessa.com/discussion/comment/39518/#Comment_39518
I do actually have a habit of opening up the MakeGames forum when I have a few minutes of idle time to kill. It's definitely more visits than is actually productive. :P
... And the spammer of the site award goes to... >_<
Could we game this by attempting to change the shape of any of these graphs? Like for example try to make the posts per day graph flatter by posting more on weekends? Nah nevermind :P
Thanks for the analysis, it'll be useful for something :)