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Vanillazilla: Tracking Vanilla's growth (Now open!)

PolPol
edited July 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
A while ago I found this site called PunBBig which lists the most popular PunBB forums on the web. It can be sorted by number of users, comments (AKA posts), and discussions (AKA topics). How about we do the same for Vanilla? I call it Vanillazilla. If people like this idea, I'll release an extension that lets your forum provide these statistics in a PHP-readable format, and I'll set up a website where you can add your Vanilla forum; it'll automatically poll it for the statistics once in a while. (Once a day, maybe.) Perhaps it could even collect long-term statistics and then generate fun graphs of activity growth. Thoughts?

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Edit Jan 18 2007: The site is now open. You can install the extension and add your forum right away.
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Comments

  • PoloPolo
    Yeah I think it is a good idea.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    That sounds neato
  • TiggrTiggr ✭
    Would be nice!
  • StashStash ✭
    So long as the data can be anonymous I'd support it :)
  • PolPol
    What do you mean, Stash?
  • PolPol
    Anyway, people, I started writing the extension. It adds its page as an extensions.php PostBackAction; the data returned is in PHP serialized format. It is currently an array containing the following keys: "Vanilla-Version" (string) "Vanillazilla-Version" (string) "Forum-Title" (string) "Forum-URL" (string) "Count-Comments" (integer) "Count-Discussions" (integer) "Count-Users" (integer) Is there any other information that would be useful for metadata or statistical purposes?
  • WaterskiaddictWaterskiaddict ✭
    date created? posts per day?
  • PolPol
    edited December 2006
    Ah, date created makes sense. Of course, posts per day could be calculated from that and the total comment count. Does a Vanilla installation keep track of when it was created?
  • WaterskiaddictWaterskiaddict ✭
    ?idk lol... I dont play with the long files lol, not unless i am told to... jk I just try not to mess stuff up, maybe the admin could supply the date...
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    I guess you could base the date on when the first post was created. Wouldnt be 100% accurate though.
    How about the time the first account was created? Again not 100%..
  • WaterskiaddictWaterskiaddict ✭
    no because, if they updated or had to dump the older database, or moved servers... or do you want how long the current install has been up?
  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    Thats why i said it wouldnt be 100% accurate. Those 2 methods would give you the length of time a vanilla install had been going unless they imported the data from a different forum software. That's the only time it'd really fail.
  • WaterskiaddictWaterskiaddict ✭
    true, sounds good then...
  • PolPol
    Indeed. I suppose it would be quite accurate to base that on the DateFirstVisit of user ID 1.
  • DinoboffDinoboff
    What about the most recent and the most popular discussions?
  • PolPol
    That seems outside the scope of a statistics tracking site.
  • VincentVincent
    then you've got people who would modify the extension to just have reasonable amounts, but they would be just enough to be random enough to put their site in the top 5 or something, how could you stop cheating?
  • LooZ^LooZ^
    Pol: What about "language"? It is possible?
  • SlashedZeroSlashedZero
    Sounds like a kickass idea, Pol :)

    LooZ^'s suggestion would be great, in my opinion. Also, maybe the number of enabled extensions would be interesting to know.
  • PolPol
    Vincent -- I know there's no foolproof way, so dealing with cheating will always be a consideration... I'm thinking that the site I put up, which aggregates all these statistics, will simply request that people email me if they suspect a site is falsifying its statistics. I'll look into it and ban the forum from my site if it seems to be true.
This discussion has been closed.