keeping the community informed…

As we enter a new year, DaniWeb continues to go from strength to strength. Our community has now passed the quarter of a million members milestone, and you can usually find more than 2000 of these members online at any time of the day or night. The number of forum postings is fast approaching half a million, and may well have passed it by the time this newsletter reaches you! Some 125 bloggers have posted more than 1350 entries, and more people are coming to DaniWeb to read our in-depth and exclusive technology news stories than ever before. So that just leaves me to wish all our members a very prosperous new year, and here’s hoping we can continue to help each other in the friendly yet informative way that nobody can manage as well as the DaniWeb community…

you scratch our back, and we will scratch yours…

The DaniWeb Link Directory is more than just your ordinary fully searchable, highly targeted, information technology specific, human edited, well trafficked and totally free directory on an indisputable high authority website. It is all these things, of course, but it also provides a great showcase for community members to show off their websites to their peers, with links being sorted based upon their performance which means that new links are not permanently stuck at the bottom of the list. What’s more, the top sites in each category are featured with thumbshots on the relevant front pages within the community, ensuring even greater exposure. Every site gets its own individual page, complete with thumbshots, and community members are able to find interesting sites via links to relevant link categories throughout DaniWeb.

Submitting a new site to the directory is easy: select the most relevant category and fill out the form specifying the URL on your domain where you link back to DaniWeb.

how to avoid bumping and hijacking threads...

Lots of new members fall into the thread hijacking and bumping trap without even realizing it, often because they have not read the rules first. We can understand this, after all you are here because you want help with a problem and your mind is focused upon that. However, if you really want to get the right answers as quickly as possible, then spending a little time making sure you are asking the right question in the right forum, and just as importantly in the right thread, is essential.

Read the Welcome Guide which explains how to search the DaniWeb database first to see if your question has already been answered, how to find the right forum to ask it if it has not, and how to post a new thread.

Read the rules before you post, to save making any unintentional slips.

Remember, that while there is nothing wrong with re-opening an old discussion if your contribution is relevant and interesting to others, you should not simply ‘bump’ an old thread by adding either a ‘me too’ response or by asking your own new and unrelated question. You should never hijack an old thread by piggybacking it with your own question in reply to the existing one. All this does is confuse the issue and you can end up with two sets of answers, to different questions, running at the same time. If you want to ask a question, always do it in a new thread assuming that you have made sure it has not been answered already elsewhere first.

every month one member makes the DaniWeb hall of fame…

Please welcome our newest member of the DaniWeb hall of fame, Zandiago who has a post count fast approaching 1000, more than 400 of them helping other members with their C++ problems. Zandiago is not just a programming guru though, he also finds time to hang out with members in the DaniWeb social club that is the Geeks’ Lounge and act as a volunteer meeter and greeter of new members over in the Community Introductions forum as well. Another deserving recipient of the DaniWeb Featured Poster badge of honor, we spoke to Zandiago in order to look behind the postings and discover what makes this friendly member of our community tick…

How old are you?

I am 21.

Where are you from?

I was born in Birmingham, England. However, I grew up in Jamaica in the Caribbean and did high school there. I then moved to Florida to study engineering. Upon completion, I was employed in Jamaica at one of their refineries.

What is your occupation?

I worked at a major bank in the USA. I started out as a teller, and then went into the operations department, then finally into the Fraud department. I left the bank but more than likely will be returning there in January of the New Year until I start working at the refinery.

What brought you to DaniWeb?

I was attracted to Daniweb because of the level of maturity among most of its members and their willingness to help. To me, it is my all-in-one IT shop.

What were your first impressions of DaniWeb, and have they changed during the time you have been with us?

Words cannot express my first impression of the site. I had a bit of problem with C++ when I started out, but with the assistance of the guys/girls in the Forum I was able to successfully complete the course with an A+. With regards to my current view on the site, I love it and the constant changes that are being made to make it more appealing to all.

What makes you stay here?

I do learn a lot of things I didn't learn from my professors and otherwise. It is also an expanding community, so I’ll try my best to make an impression for the positive.

You spend a lot of time helping people with C++ problems, but also acting as a friendly face welcoming new members to our community: what makes you tick?

Even though I've completed the C++ course that I'll need, I stay around to help others as I know that learning a new programming language can be frustrating at times. With regards to welcoming new ones to the forum, I think that if they feel that others are genuine and express warmth, they'll perhaps be inclined to stick around a bit more. It's also a good place to meet ones from different areas in the world.

What are your interests outside of IT and outside of DaniWeb?

When I'm not at school/working, I'm playing soccer, cricket and tennis. I love music, reggae to be specific. I attend many of the reggae concerts throughout the year. In 2008, I'll be doing a bit of traveling. I’m also a kid at heart, so I still play my video games, I actually still play the old Nintendo games…Double Dragon, Top-Gun, Streets of Rage, Mario etc… I also like to watch the Discovery channel and a few western movies at times.

Name the best thing about DaniWeb, and one thing you would change if it were in your power?

The best thing about DaniWeb is its mature members who are willing to assist. I love the site as is, but I’d perhaps change the fact that reputation points don’t count in the Coffee House!

How long do you spend, on average, on DaniWeb every day?

I spend around 3-5 hours each day depending on my schedule.

by happygeek

According to John Lilly, the Firefox web browser has 126 million unique monthly users. A figure extrapolated from an Active Daily Users number of 48 million, itself a massive increase on the 23 million ADU figure from this time last year. So who is John Lilly and why should we take any notice of his figures? Well, Lilly happens to be the Chief Operating Officer at Mozilla and the figures have been reached by analysing statistical data from the Firefox browser update service logs.

Lilly admits that the various browser market share reports, while having value are subject to different biases. "The most basic issue is that there's no way to really represent the complexity and the dynamism of the global Web - it's just too big, with too many things changing too rapidly" he says. So you get a global share reported at the top end as high as 36%, while Mozilla itself seems happy with a consolidated share garnered from numerous data reports at somewhere in the region of 20%. The problems of measurement are magnified by the metrics used, many of which happen to be in page views. "As hard as it is to get an accurate read on worldwide traffic numbers for Firefox" Lilly comments "it's even harder to figure out the relationship between page views and users. We have some intuitions here, supported by anecdotal evidence, that Firefox users look at more pages and do more searches than typical users, but nothing that I'd actually call science."

Which is why Mozilla has looked to its own systems to get a different measure on Firefox popularity globally, the number of active users out there. Firefox uses an application update service (AUS) system to jeep the software up-to-date with security patches etc. Every day, Firefox pings these AUS servers to check for any new updates. Don't worry privacy hounds, these pings are non-identifiable. However, Mozilla does count them, and categorize them by language version. This means that at any given time it is possible for Mozilla to know how many instances of Firefox are running around the planet. OK, so it's not going to be accurate to the last man or woman, but as a rough guide it's pretty darn good.

To arrive at the 126 million monthly users number, Lilly took the 42 million ADU figure and used the accepted website method of multiplying by 3 to convert it into monthly uniques. "This is a conservative multiplier (we think it could be more like 3.5) that we've gotten to by doing some of our own experiments, piecing together data we've received from sites who have done their own calculations, and then really testing them against the best common sense top-down tests we can" Lilly insists.

I tend to agree with him, and think the actual figure is going to be much higher thanks mainly to the 'Firefox Dark Matter' phenomena that comes courtesy of Linux users. The problem being that users who get their Firefox fix as part of a Linux distro will most likely have the automatic update feature itself disabled, because the distro will manage those security updates instead. Lilley admits that this dark matter exists "but we don't have ways to see it. Linux use certainly accounts for at least single-digit millions every day (and maybe more), but it's hard to say exactly how many."