It’s cold and wet so I am housebound and bored so I thought I would play with some data. For most people this doesn’t jump out as the fun thing to do to amuse yourself but you might find the results interesting - free your inner nerd.
I downloaded the forum’s user statistics for the the last year and loaded the data into Excel. To give you an idea of what this looks like the table has seven columns of data: Received, Given, Topics, Replies, Viewed, Read and Visits. There are 3550 data rows, one row per member. Choice staff are treated the same as the rest.
A word of caution, the method I used to grab the data is not 100% reliable but ought to be pretty good. One major limitation is that any figure over 1000 is rounded to two significant figures so any statistic relying on those figures is approximate but good enough to play with.
Before I reveal any more, let us see who has a feel for what goes on here.
Question 1
Of all the members roughly what proportion were active during the last year? By active I mean they did something in one or more of the above seven categories of action.
Question 2
Looking at just the Replies column sorted from highest to lowest number of replies. Stepping down the list and accumulating the number of replies as you go how many rows down the list do you have to go to account for 50% or more of the replies in the year?
If the membership are all equally active you would go about half way down the list, so the answer would be something like 1800. But some members reply much more often and some never do. So how many rows down does it take to account for half the replies, 100, 500, where?
Question 3
In the year how many members visited more than 300 days?
This is for fun, so think about it for a few seconds and reply with three answers, I am not asking you to check my work but to get some understanding of what the group thinks is happening.
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