How do I know how many discussions a member has started in a period?

[Jeff]

Anybody know how to determine this?

Popular Contributors is of no value. I can't determine out how it works for the life of me.

[Laura]

I'd assume you can get this programmatically using individuals' discussion RSS feeds.

Laura

[Jeff]

Sorry to appear thick, but how?

I assume you mean by writing some code but how would I do that? Where do I start? And how do I implement it when as far as I can see I don't have access to code.

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Jeff,

It sounds like you'd need to poll the network's new discussion RSS feed externally, and keep track of how many discussions each individual member started on a particular day. Once you've collected that information for a while it would let you determine how many discussions each member has started, say, in the last month.

Popular Contributors measure all time discussions and replies.

[Jeff]

Hi Phil

If 'keep track' means to manually count, that isn't quite what I had in mind.

That will be fine but having to manually keep counting these things is just getting too time consuming. I am trying to acknowledge members activity but the time to do so is getting too much.

I will be counting blog posts, discussions, photos, comments etc. I can't see that this is a sustainable method.

Can't Ning just make these stats available in a simplified manner? Even a CSV dump summarized by day. Number of posts, comments etc per member per day. Make it something we can get, just like the member list, when we need it.

How dose Popular Contributors decide who goes to the top of the list? It is different on the main forum page and on the Popular Contributors page??

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi Jeff,

I was imagining a script that polled the RSS every 30 minutes, parsed the results, and counted these things up for you rather than something that needed to be done manually.

Stats like this are more likely to be attached to a points and ranking system, which is something we're currently looking at.

The Popular Contributors list on the main (old style) forum page lists members numerically by the number of topics and responses that they've made. Topics and responses are weighted equally, and the list shows the 5 most active of all time. The Popular Contributors page (confusingly, I agree) shows all those who have ever created a topic or made a response, ordered by the date they joined the network, with the newest first.

[Jeff]

Thanks Phil. That explains the difference between two areas for popular Contributors. I was hoping to use that page to show those who have posted the most. Oh well.

Good to hear you are working on a ranking system. That could be good. Hopefully you will give us creators the actual figures somehow.

Don't think my abilities will extend to writing a script for parsing an RSS feed so looks like that's out as well.

Getting user stats on a site is really so basic for managing it, I really hope Ning can work on providing this somehow.