Hi Dani
Would it be possible to have a second page (cached/updated every 7 days) of stats where it shows graphs of fortnightly stats for things like the following.

  • Line graph of (Total reputation added to daniweb).
  • Line graph of (My received reputation) and (My sent reputation) on same graph.
  • Pi graph of (Threads made) and (Threads solved) in the past fortnight.
  • Pi graph of (Repution points added) and (voting points added)

And any other graphs people can think of and post here. Note that all stats are restricted to the past fortnight and the page with these stats only gets updated every 7 days. Also to save cpu you could make it a members only page meaning you must be signed in to view it.
Thank you

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why hasn't anybody replied to this? I understand dani is a very busy person especially with this new Panda update but I would like to know that I haven't been abandoned.

> but I would like to know that I haven't been abandoned.

Maybe because those who visit the feedback section are not too much into fancy graphs and charts? Honest question: given the kind of resource investment (programming/hardware/maintenance) this requires, what does adding this/these features buy to the site as a whole?

I can't speak for others but I'm pretty happy with giving the solved thread/reputation points a passing glance. Too many details presented would be an overkill IMO for both the parties.

> but I would like to know that I haven't been abandoned.

Maybe because those who visit the feedback section are not too much into fancy graphs and charts? Honest question: given the kind of resource investment (programming/hardware/maintenance) this requires, what does adding this/these features buy to the site as a whole?

I can't speak for others but I'm pretty happy with giving the solved thread/reputation points a passing glance. Too many details presented would be an overkill IMO for both the parties.

I'm talking about expanding this page by providing several more stats pages as we have very little insight as to what the stats of daniweb are. So the stats wouldn't be all around the site but together on a group of pages (some cached weekly) dedicated to the stats of the site so users have to actually go to the Top Members by Rank to view them. Or perhaps instead of what I suggested you could have an ajax feature on the Top Members by Rank where users can make their own line graphs by specifying specific variables over a specified time frame and a graph is produced.

I'm not entirely sure I see the point of these graphs aside from the initial novelty. Keep in mind that there needs to be some sort of justification for a new feature because there's a cost to both the implementation and maintenance going forward. Since I'm reasonably sure Dani has more important things on her plate than pretty pictures with questionable usefulness, I'd start by asking you how we would all benefit from providing more stats on the top members page?

It would benefit us by being able to see which members are and have been contributing the most. Currently we can only see the stats captured for one point in time where as a graph would show them for a series of points in time. And I don't know about you but I think it would be interesting to compare my posts per day to someone else's for lets say the past month on a chart. If CPU is a problem I believe Javascript is capable of generating line graphs although it's hard to do and as an alternative to Javascript, there is Java and Flash. Also Google provides an API to generate charts so the chart is being rendered on Google's servers.

I have to admit that I do not really see the point of pretty graphs for such stats. Why should I, or indeed you, really care about whether you have made more posts than another member over a given period of time? Serious question by the way, not meant to be sarcastic.

Well in the case of the most posts over a given period of time it shows not so much who gave the most posts as it does that too but rather it shows when the user peaked at making new posts and stopped making new posts. Or for example if you were to have a line for positive reputation, a line for negative reputation over time then you can see when the reputation was awarded and when the user was less abusive. So there are all sorts of things you can find out with charts that are harder to find out with numbers.

it shows when the user peaked at making new posts and stopped making new posts

How would this metric matter?

you can see when the reputation was awarded and when the user was less abusive

The only time this would be more useful than overall reputation at any given point would be for a member who has an overwhelmingly good or bad history and suddenly changed. In my experience this is an extremely rare pattern.

So there are all sorts of things you can find out with charts that are harder to find out with numbers.

I'm not trying to be dismissive of your suggestion, but there are all sorts of things you can find out with charts that are completely useless. Unless the effort involved in implementing this is so trivial as to be virtually zero-cost, there must be some sort of return on that effort to justify adding the feature and maintaining it.

I thought it would be a nice and handy tool to have but if nobody is going to use it or maintain it then I suppose there isn't much point on having it. O'well. I guess this idea has too bigger costs with too fewer benefits.
Thanks for you feedback anyways. I shall mark this as solved.

PS.
While the mods are all on here could you please take the time to visit my thread here.

Sorry I have taken so long to make my way into this thread. I actually sorta like the idea of having pretty charts and graphs, mostly because I've been doing so much in advertising and marketing lately. I've been swayed to the dark side. If I can come up with an idea that would actually be useful, I might add a chart of some kind to the existing stats page if I have some spare time one weekend. It's really hard to justify adding it to my existing todo list though.

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