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Development => Calculators => Calc Projects, Programming & Tutorials => Topic started by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 05, 2015, 07:49:49 AM

Title: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 05, 2015, 07:49:49 AM
This project started in February 2010. Back then, I became interested in how the TI community activity, in terms of forum posting, had evolved over the years. Over the decades, many sites came and went, with each site having their respective periods of high activity, inactivity and often demise, thanks to many factors that varied from one site to another. I was also intrigued by the 2004 and 2010 activity spikes and wanted to compare each year and periods of time.

At first, I decided to compare the big English forums at the time since they were the easiest to grab stats from. I originally only included 2005 to present. However, I eventually decided to add more websites, including smaller ones, then I created a yearly forum activity spreadsheet, which I ended up updating at the end of every year of halfway through the year depending of my free time. This culminated to last week, where I finally decided to add 2002 to 2004 stats, as well as stats for 68K and non-English sites to the list, along with many smaller sites that I had forgot the URL of, but were thankfully listed at http://tistory.wikidot.com .

No script was used to achieve this. It was all done manually, during scattered moments of boredom, often taking less time than people might think (the worst of all is CalcGames). On certain forums, it was simply a matter of manually finding early January or late December posts (usually in website news sections), checking their ID, then incrementing the ID by an amount specific to the site activity that I remembered back then (eg if they averaged around 100 posts per day I just incremented IDs by chunks of 100, then less and less as I approached the date), until I land on the first public post of that year. On dead forums, it was simply a matter of counting them by hand and on smaller sites that managed to remain active for only 1 year. But then there were the complicated cases where the site had significant activity, but no way to get post ID, or worse, where the actual messages (or the entire site) were permanently gone. This is where Archive.org (and TI-Story for lost URL's) came to the rescue.

Due to the manual nature of archiving those stats and the lack of viable Archive.org cache for certain defunct or rebooted forums, the yearly posting statistics that I managed to grab back then and more recently are not accurate. They, however, should be just enough to give you an overall idea of how the TI community activity moved from place to place over the last 13 years.

So here, below, you can see the TI community activity of 60 forums/messageboards from 2002 to 2015! :D

http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats

Empty spaces means that the website either had no forum yet or its most recent version have shut down entirely. Question marks means missing stats. Also, the following boards (which didn't even survive one year) were not listed, because it appears that no trace of them are available at the Wayback Machine, so retrieving activity data from those sites will most likely never be possible:
-Electroshock Programming
-Midknight Software (formerly Destination Software)
-TI-Jon
-CodyMoats Programming
-SpitFire Productions
-Mogsoft
-Hays Games
-The Calc Site
-Outer Limits Software
-Nerdy Productions
-Basic.Revolution
-Frost Fusion Games
-Hello83
-Michaelv.org
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Adriweb on June 05, 2015, 11:16:41 AM
That's... interesting :P

Also, some numbers directly extracted from TI-Planet's DB (so, which are a lower-bound, since posts can be deleted over time, (like Mic's for instance), but still, relatively pretty close, I suppose)
(https://i.imgur.com/n0MVN4G.png)

So, until [late-]2011 (included), it's TI-Bank, then it's TI-Planet.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 05, 2015, 01:24:00 PM
Yeah that's what I figured when I started finding the first post of each year with TI-Planet. Thankfully the IDs were still available as they were before Mic's posts deletion so it was pretty easy to do it. What surprises me is that the 2004-07 stats aren't lower, but I guess that in 2006-07 Tama was there for something :P (after that year is not surprising since that's around when Mic became less active)


Now imagine if when a TI calculator forum died, it was archived and merged into one, then there would be 1.5 million posts since 2002 (probably even more once I add the missing stats). Of course there would be many duplicates in 2004-06, though, as it was a very common practice to cross-post projects on 5 different boards back then (especially during the infamous 2004-05 invasion of small new programming teams), and merging every site upfront while still in operation would have been impossible due to potential conflicts resulting from different mentalities, but that would have been one hell of a big site.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 05, 2015, 04:01:04 PM
Hooray for CW for being the most active in 2015 yet!  :w00t: also i notice how some have like 60 posts. In a whole year? O.O
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 05, 2015, 05:41:58 PM
Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on June 05, 2015, 04:01:04 PM
Hooray for CW for being the most active in 2015 yet!  :w00t: also i notice how some have like 60 posts. In a whole year? O.O

WE are suuuuuch spammers :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 05, 2015, 06:10:26 PM
Yeah the 60 post ones are usually what happens when people start a forum, but are not active enough themselves and won't replace inactive staff fast enough to allow the forums to live. But there are so many factors that can lead to a forum demise (eg wrong or controversial admin decisions/site changes, certain users or staff hindering user experience, unstable hosting provider/site access, prolonged downtime, not providing enough interesting content, etc), and unless you're Revsoft or Omni, it's quite hard to recover afterward.
Quote from: Unicorn on June 05, 2015, 05:41:58 PM
Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on June 05, 2015, 04:01:04 PM
Hooray for CW for being the most active in 2015 yet!  :w00t: also i notice how some have like 60 posts. In a whole year? O.O

WE are suuuuuch spammers :P
I'm trying to control that a bit, though, when it gets too far :P, not to mention that one day, we might actually need more staff and that staff will need to have learned to control their spam trigger :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 05, 2015, 06:14:51 PM
I think my test forum has more posts than 60 (well, at least more posts / day or something). Also didn;t ominaga start in 2001? or is that since they restarted or sokething (so i heard)?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 05, 2015, 06:19:19 PM
I don't think a test forum counts :P, but it's kinda sad if an established forum can't even get as many posts as a test one. Sadly that is often out of people's control, though.

And I created Omnimaga on Sept 1st 2001, but it did not get a website until 2004. The restart was in August 2008 (they closed in March of that year). I stepped down from admin in July 2011, though.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 05, 2015, 08:40:50 PM
Cool that is interesting since I have only been in the calc community for a few months and a programmer for two years :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 05, 2015, 09:42:08 PM
Did you start calculator programming two years ago too or was it programming for other platforms?

Also I just remembered that I need to add the forums that were hosted on TI-Galaxy in the list. (EDIT: It appears that only Cirrus still has forum caches on archive.org)

EDIT: I compiled CalcHaven stats now. Darn... they restarted from scratch like 5 times. No wonder why they didn't survive. While they were spammy, they had quite some potential to remain alive, because they had 10000 posts one year.

EDIT: yAronet underway. I actually did them for fun in 2010 but I scrapped the project because most cache back then were from August or April. Now they have many from December or January

EDIT: yAronet done. For some reasons from mid 2013 to mid 2014 they lost like 250000 posts, then regained most of them back afterward.

EDIT: CalcWare and TI-89.org done as well. Same for TI-Center. I didn't know that last one survived in 2006, considering the front page had a virus in 2006.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 05, 2015, 10:19:45 PM
Yeah this is actually quite impressing and interesting :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 06, 2015, 01:11:19 AM
This is quite cool! Wait!!!!!! update it quick! I posted 6 times on cmetech today!!!!
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 06, 2015, 01:30:18 AM
Nah I won't update 2015 stats yet. I'll have to update them again afterwards anyway :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 06, 2015, 09:54:56 AM
Yeah that would be very time consuming, updating them every day :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 06, 2015, 02:11:33 PM
Here is the updated spreadsheet and I am also updating the first post.:

(http://img.codewalr.us/tiforumstats2.png)

Basically, from what I can gather,

From 2002 to 2004: yAronet 68K board leads by far the entire community in activity. However, about 70-90% of the posts were flame wars and in 2002 it was before the off-topic boards split off into a different yN forum.
In 2005 it's MaxCoderz
In 2006 it's Cemetech
In 2007 and 2008 it's United-TI.
From 2009 to 2014 it's Omnimaga (including their 115000 posts year).
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 06, 2015, 06:26:54 PM
And then from 2015 onward its CodeWalrus! :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 06, 2015, 07:15:50 PM
If we extrapolate the stats so far, yeah. Though that could probably hange since its been only like 6 months
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 06, 2015, 07:58:37 PM
Yeah, we never know, since we are mostly a development site rather thab calc help. Dev sites don't get as much of a boost on august/september. But yeah if we extrapolate the stats, it seems like CW, Cemetech and TI-Planet got big chances to hit over 20K in december, maybe more for CW since we already got 11K in that page (now 12K)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 07, 2015, 12:42:05 AM
Like if we continue how we have, because most of the posting is very active members, we should have at least 25k by the end of the year.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 07, 2015, 04:37:29 AM
Yeah it is awesome to see CW grow :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 07, 2015, 09:09:16 AM
Maybe it's cause CW has a big off-topic section :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 07, 2015, 03:58:10 PM
Off topic is the leader in posts out of all the boards O.O
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 07, 2015, 04:01:07 PM
Indeed, and that's also why yAronet board had lots of activity in 2002. Back then the off-topic section was part of the TI board. MaxCoderz also had lots of offtopicness in 2005-07 (their off-topic board was like 33% of the entire site). That is inevitable considering how we are interested in different hobbies besides calcs. :P

However if there is enough discussion about a theme in particular (eg gaming) I generally make a new board about it.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 07, 2015, 04:03:40 PM
Yeah, speaking about hobbies I am getting into Airsoft ;)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 07, 2015, 04:50:06 PM
Oh cool. Sadly thats illegal in the netherlands q.q
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 07, 2015, 05:05:42 PM
Do you mean airsoft guns? Over here in Canada I don't remember if they are legal or not. I know they outlawed those tiny guns thay kids used to shoot tiny bullets made of plastic or tinfoil in residential areas because kid kept shooting them at people who wandered on the sidewalk.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 07, 2015, 10:10:11 PM
Yeah they are not illegal here in the US. I have a few friend that I get together with and play but I don't have a gun yet but that will change in a few days (hopefully).
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: DarkestEx on June 07, 2015, 10:35:35 PM
Awesome work, DJ :D
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 08, 2015, 12:05:59 AM
Thanks. :D

Also I wonder if other forums about calcs opened in recent years? I just remembered about TI-84 Plus.com now. It would be possible that we don't know since some people mostly use chats or blogs then publish stuff on Github now, but I guess it's unlikely.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 08, 2015, 01:01:43 PM
There was a website that I stumbled across for  the Prime but now I can't find it  :(
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 08, 2015, 01:26:58 PM
Wasn't HP Museum the only HP forum?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 08, 2015, 02:10:06 PM
It had the documentation of all the syntax help and multiple downloads but it didn't look that active :( I will see if I can dig it up :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 08, 2015, 04:15:44 PM
It actually leads every calc forun in activity, but almost everyone either hate the HP Prime and only like RPN calcs or they don't care about games nor hardware hacking for ASM support.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 08, 2015, 04:29:48 PM
RPN calcs? is that where you have to insert the equation in RPN? sounds irritating <_<
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Ivoah on June 08, 2015, 04:30:43 PM
Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on June 08, 2015, 04:29:48 PM
RPN calcs? is that where you have to insert the equation in RPN? sounds irritating <_<
I think RPN can be faster if you're used to using it.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 08, 2015, 04:35:21 PM
certainly easier for the calculator to execute
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 08, 2015, 04:37:53 PM
Those people used HP calcs since the 80's and are in their late 50's. This is probably why many prefer RPN to algebraic.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 08, 2015, 08:21:53 PM
Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on June 08, 2015, 04:35:21 PM
certainly easier for the calculator to execute
Meh... the Prime is blazing fast :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 08, 2015, 08:48:05 PM
Quote from: alexgt on June 08, 2015, 08:21:53 PM
Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on June 08, 2015, 04:35:21 PM
certainly easier for the calculator to execute
Meh... the Prime is blazing fast :P

Na..... The CSE is super blazing fast :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 08, 2015, 08:58:02 PM
it's like a race car.

Also for some reason i had to think of that my parents still have a TI-35 laying around somewhere :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 08, 2015, 10:26:38 PM
I never heard of the TI-35 actually. Is it like the TI-59 or more like the TI-99?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 08, 2015, 10:31:46 PM
It's not a graphical calculator, its just an advanced hand calculator. Anyway i think my grandpa used it O.O
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 09, 2015, 01:05:03 PM
Aaah right. I was wondering if it was programmable. The TI-99 is more like a computer too actually.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 09, 2015, 01:08:01 PM
I have a Ti-30 on my desk:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/TI-30_LED.png)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 09, 2015, 01:20:57 PM
Doesn't it require to be plugged into the wall socket? That might be annoying if the teacher passes by and trips on the cord :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 09, 2015, 01:34:27 PM
There is a place for some kind of connection but it runs on a 9v battery.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 09, 2015, 02:21:27 PM
Oh ok. IIRC there was a TI  or HP calc that lacked battery support. Maybe because batteries didn't exist back then. Imagine a calc that runs at 120 volts <_<
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 09, 2015, 02:23:14 PM
Well if you had an outlet the power would't be a problem :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 09, 2015, 02:25:28 PM
But then that brings back the issue about the teacher probably not expecting wires to go through the classroom so when checking if students are working, he could hurt himself by tripping on the cord. :P Now I was more talking about a calc literally using 120 volts of power  instead of like, 6-9.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: TheMachine02 on June 09, 2015, 02:28:16 PM
But but but ... you want to put a Xeon in this calc or what ?  :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 09, 2015, 02:32:03 PM
Oh I was talking about 60-70's calcs. Back then the technology was much less advanced. :P Also weren't computers the size of a gym?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: TheMachine02 on June 09, 2015, 02:37:21 PM
Yeah, with the computer being the size of a room, and eating half the production of a nuclear central. That would be funny back then  :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 09, 2015, 03:42:32 PM
On a side note, I am removing Hays Games from the forum list. It appears that their web board that used to be located at http://amazingforums.com/forum/HAYSCORP/ is gone (it was still up a few years ago and I even made an epic necropost with Kerm) and Archive.org never cached it, so there will never be a way to retrieve post stats for it.

EDIT: TICT board is done from 2002 to 2010. It was not hard to add at first, but when I reached 2008 it became nightmarish. The only way to do it afterward, due to lack of viable Archive cache, is to count every topic reply one by one >.< (thankfully the forums are still around there aren't that many posts from after 2008 outside the TIGCC programming sub-forum)

EDIT: TICT is now complete. They had like 10 posts a year after 2011. But that's pretty much the case of every 68K-only forum after 2010.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 09, 2015, 07:43:46 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 05, 2015, 09:42:08 PM
Did you start calculator programming two years ago too or was it programming for other platforms?
Sorry for not seeing this :P
I started with Ti-Basic on a 84+ :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Lionel Debroux on June 09, 2015, 07:58:54 PM
About the TICT/TIGCC message board: I stopped attending my own board after getting doubly censored, by guess whom, for suggesting to a user that he should post on e.g. Omnimaga, which was more active. That was several days after the post had gone unnoticed. In the first round of censorship, only the links were removed; after I put them back with a public complaint, the whole post, including technical content, was erased.
I could have bothered Thomas Nussbaumer immediately so that he spanked the offender appropriately, but I decided to focus on more productive matters instead. I told him a while later, for informational purposes only.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 09, 2015, 09:41:53 PM
To be honest, I never understood (and when you tell me, I forget immediately afterward) why you are not root admin of your own board, considering you are at the head of the TICT website. If, back when I ran Omni, had no admin powers on my own board and that I received abuse from a biased moderator, I would have immediately created a new forum somewhere, even if it meant a crappy Invisionfree or Forumactif board, then replaced the messageboard link with it in my website navigation. But again, most people on TICT board came for TIGCC help, not TICT releases, so perhaps it would have been better off to just link to some other existing TI forum so that the person doesn't get attention.

It is not surprising that every forum moderated by the TICT mod you are mentionning died abruptly after 2005 (or immediately after becoming mod at the said site if he joined later). Here is an updated TI community yearly activity chart, which now includes TI-Gen and TICT (although 2007-08 TICT stats might be quite innacurate):

(http://img.codewalr.us/tiforumstats3.png)

And some other sites died rapidly or split off for much less worse stuff, which shows that forums with people who constantly instigates disputes  and have biased moderation that favors specific people tend to not remain lively for long, since eventually people will just leave in bulk, either leaving calc stuff for good, migrating to another forum or starting their own. In the least worse cases of forums where controversial remarks are often launched, it is not as bad and the site can easily recover, but some people will stay away. When a staff's forum goes from 20K posts straight to 2K in one year there is a serious problem and they truly did piss people off hard to achieve that (or the people were already pissed, then finally had enough). But there are exceptions, of course, such as prolonged downtime.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Lionel Debroux on June 10, 2015, 05:47:26 AM
I used to be one of the admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, indeed.
Around 2005, several months after finding out for good about you know who's shenanigans, and understanding how he had betrayed my trust and naiveness, the mood had degraded on the board, as a result of the tougher interaction between him and me now gone public. So I gave moderator privileges to a couple reasonable friends from TI-Gen (they were root staff there and we interacted with them on a daily basis), with a mission of keeping him and me on check, because our behaviour had started turning users off the board. I did so without discussing the matter with the other admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, and I stated the promotion publicly, IIRC in one of the topics where infighting was occurring.

Soon thereafter (an hour or so, IIRC), you know who revoked these moderator privileges, before either of these persons was even able to use them, as well as my own admin privileges.
Of course, that made me angry, but by the next day (I found out about the move shortly before leaving the university, and at the time, I didn't have Internet access at the flat), I decided not to fight against the move. Not fighting soon proved to be one of the best things I ever did for the TI-68k community's sake: you know who had already conspired with Sebastian about forking the TIGCC message board to another place if I asked Thomas Nussbaumer to override his move, and needless to say, publicly make me forever responsible for the change. He stated multiple times that he was very surprised that I didn't fight his action; looks like he thought my behaviour was as predictable as his... but fortunately, it isn't.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 10, 2015, 06:05:25 AM
UPDATE: Both Tout-82 forums have their stats compiled now!

Those two sites are really strange: In 2013, Tout-82 was redone from scratch on Forumactif because the original site had an outdated forum software and unmaintained site. However, they decided to keep both versions of the site running afterward and many members stayed behind. So the result is that there are now two different sites of the same name currently in operation (and struggling for activity). Some moderators maintain both boards.

Quote from: Lionel Debroux on June 10, 2015, 05:47:26 AM
I used to be one of the admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, indeed.
Around 2005, several months after finding out for good about you know who's shenanigans, and understanding how he had betrayed my trust and naiveness, the mood had degraded on the board, as a result of the tougher interaction between him and me now gone public. So I gave moderator privileges to a couple reasonable friends from TI-Gen (they were root staff there and we interacted with them on a daily basis), with a mission of keeping him and me on check, because our behaviour had started turning users off the board. I did so without discussing the matter with the other admins of the TICT/TIGCC board, and I stated the promotion publicly, IIRC in one of the topics where infighting was occurring.

Soon thereafter (an hour or so, IIRC), you know who revoked these moderator privileges, before either of these persons was even able to use them, as well as my own admin privileges.
Of course, that made me angry, but by the next day (I found out about the move shortly before leaving the university, and at the time, I didn't have Internet access at the flat), I decided not to fight against the move. Not fighting soon proved to be one of the best things I ever did for the TI-68k community's sake: you know who had already conspired with Sebastian about forking the TIGCC message board to another place if I asked Thomas Nussbaumer to override his move, and needless to say, publicly make me forever responsible for the change. He stated multiple times that he was very surprised that I didn't fight his action; looks like he thought my behaviour was as predictable as his... but fortunately, it isn't.

Yeah the thing is that until around when the guy bashed my three POTY BASIC contenders in December 2005, he had a small group of hardcore followers who worshiped him like a god and defended him at any cost. After the 2005 POTY incident about my BASIC games on his forum then the other one about F-Zero 68K, he got pretty much everybody except maybe three people on his bad side and they finally realized the truth. Add to that another incident in 2006, then the French 68K community was done.

On the other hand, certain people on French TI-68K forums liked to troll and often tried to drag him into flame wars instead of devoting enough time to moderate him. But of course, I'm not admin of those sites so I'm not one to tell others how to run their sites. I only wish that back in the days, we could have convinced members who are fed up with the situation to switch over to Omnimaga or TI-BANK, before those members are gone for good, but again, it would have been hard to convince people to continue using a tool made by him, so perhaps that wouldn't have worked, not to mention that TI has put 68K calcs on life support years ago.. (they're still sold here, but nobody makes program for them and I bet that they are no longer really produced)


EDIT: Macross Software stats are now complete, as well as Espace-TI.

Another problem with new forums is that most people only care about calcs for 2 years, so they enthusiasticly launch new TI discussion forums, only to abandon them 2 years later.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 10, 2015, 11:36:30 PM
UPDATE: Stats for Tama-Team and the Z80 yAronet forum have been added. However, I cannot retrieve stats for the Z80 forum from before it was hosted on yAronet, because Archive.org has an annoying robot.txt exclusion bug that checks current robot.txt instead of archived ones, so if a website is available in the archive for browsing, but then one day, the domain name is squatted and the robot.txt starts blocking archive.org bots, then all archived copies of the website will be no longer available, rather than just copies from after the domain name squatting. It's a shame, because forum89.vvlr.com was available in the archive for about 12 years until recently...

EDIT Here is the completed chart, for now (maybe I'll find other sites in the future)
(http://img.codewalr.us/tiforumstats5.png)

EDIT: There are now extra stats, such as how many forums per year had opened/closed, how many had 1000 posts, how many had 10000, 20000, etc.

Also, I notice that there is a massive increase in post quality overall in the TI community since 1997. From 1997 to 2002 it was pretty much like Youtube comments with lots of spam, from 2003 to 2009, low quality forum discussion was rampant, especially during the 2007 upsurge of new French forums, then randomness flatlined afterward.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 11, 2015, 06:04:35 AM
Yeah, I occasonally find old topics on cemetech, and its pretty spammy.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 11, 2015, 06:31:19 AM
The worst was ticalc.org comments, though. The most notable example at the time was the TI Keyboard news, which had like 800 comments of almost just randomness. But also, some forums like CalcHaven, Tama-Team and Espace-TI had an high concentration of forum games and low relevant content. Same for Omnimaga, late 2006 and most of 2007. I kinda wish that CH did not switch to a new forum 5 times, though, because they had quite a lot of potential to last longer. They should have stuck with the Invisionfree forum they started with and point their domain name there.

Revsoft is also another site that had quite a lot of potential. There were some questionable decisions in early 2009 about a troublesome user, who almost completely destroyed their fanbase, but after a one year lull or so, they started reviving and seemed to head in the right direction. Unfortunately, their hosting shut down with no trace of the provider nor their data. They also lost their domain name in the process, because they were no longer able to reach the owner to point it to a new site. So Revsoft was down for 4 months until they decided to restart everything from scratch at http://revsoft.tifreakware.net without the referencing from other sites (including large blogs) that linked to revsoft.org . Fortunately, the remaining staff overall didn't give up, but most people don't even know that they still exist.

The problem with most other sites of that size is that most TI community members stick around for 2 years at most, so if they start their own forum, they will often vanish off the face of the earth and abandon the forums without telling members that it's closing and to go elsewhere.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 11, 2015, 06:36:21 AM
Didn't ticalc also have a bunch of flame wars!
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 11, 2015, 07:22:16 AM
Yeah, during the TI-Files vs Ticalc.org rivalry in the 90's, in particular. BASIC vs ASM flame wars were also quite common until 2005 or so.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 11, 2015, 07:52:32 AM
A forum with discussions isn't really a problem. But flame wars are just bad.
.
.
.
ASM wins
/me runs
(note: this was a joke, i don't actually want to start a flamewar :P)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: TheMachine02 on June 11, 2015, 03:04:40 PM
I really didn't understand how could flame wars start/even exist. I mean, of course every language are different, each other have their specification, advantage/disadvantage. We can't really say  one language is better than another. But yeah, seing 'old topic, it seems that it goes pretty far.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 11, 2015, 03:22:39 PM
It has something to do with the intolerance or elitism of certain human beings and on the Internet, they usually gather in groups at forums where they don't risk getting banned for it.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 12, 2015, 05:51:41 AM
TODO:

-Add Time to Team (yN)
-Forum TI-83+ (Ftp83plus hosted on yAronet)
-Frost Fusion Games
-TIFT (yN)
-TI International Forum (yN)
-ETP Studios (yN)
-Shadow Phoenix forums (hello83)
-Nerdy Productions (I think they had a forums too)
-The TI Programmers Union
-Basic Revolution (http://s9.invisionfree.com/basicrev/index.php?act=idx) by CDI
-MyTI.net (still up at http://myti.phpbb.net/ )

That's of course if Archive.org still even has any cached stats. It's possible that the latter two are still online, though.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 12, 2015, 07:56:40 AM
Cool!

Also cumred: Ruby tumphs alll!!!!!!@ mwahahahaha! So don't even try :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 12, 2015, 08:09:50 AM
u wot m8. i swer on me mum i will hit u rite in the gabber u cheeky fekker
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 12, 2015, 08:11:45 AM
Wats a fekker? some kind of animal? also, ASM sux like snakes.

Ok, dnoughfaking :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 12, 2015, 09:13:38 PM
Quote from: Unicorn on June 12, 2015, 08:11:45 AM
Wats a fekker? some kind of animal? also, ASM sux like snakes.

Ok, dnoughfaking :P
[spoiler=Urban dictionary sooo...]http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fekker[/spoiler]
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 12, 2015, 09:18:59 PM
Let's cut down on the spam, please. :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 15, 2015, 03:13:51 AM
UPDATE:

I added 4 yAronet boards to the list, but I can't find 2007 stats for Time to Team, since they temporarily lost a massive amount of posts that year it seems, then when they retrieved them, the total was lower than 2006.

EDIT: Added TI-Programmers Union, MyTI and Ftp83plus to the list. There are now 60 forums in the list!

(http://img.codewalr.us/tiforumstats6.png)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 16, 2015, 04:33:57 AM
Cool! Also, alex I was just messing arounfd its pretty easy to understand. :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 16, 2015, 05:14:57 AM
On a side note, I think that future versions of the chart will gray out 0-post years so that it's easier to see which forum had any life in it on a given year. I initially thought about just omitting those years and adding RIP after a site shut down, but that got too confusing.

Also Michaelv.org is another site I forgot to add, but finally won't be added, because it is not available on archive.org
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 16, 2015, 05:42:58 AM
Oh, that is a good idea. When its done will you post it on other sites?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 16, 2015, 12:57:51 PM
It actually surprises me how many calculater related forums there are O.O
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 16, 2015, 01:07:25 PM
That's because most people who started forums started them only to have admin powers. People thought that being admin somewhere made you look cool. Many of the small programming teams were not even teams and when they were, they were about three staff member who were also staff of several other smaller programming teams (for example, at one point I ended up being global moderator of 6 different forums, 3 of which where I was just promoted before even posting)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 16, 2015, 01:14:27 PM
Same with people who start minecraft servers just tohaveadmin powers i guess <_<
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: princetonlion.tibd on June 16, 2015, 09:44:00 PM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 16, 2015, 01:07:25 PM
That's because most people who started forums started them only to have admin powers. People thought that being admin somewhere made you look cool. Many of the small programming teams were not even teams and when they were, they were about three staff member who were also staff of several other smaller programming teams (for example, at one point I ended up being global moderator of 6 different forums, 3 of which where I was just promoted before even posting)
My failed invisionfree forum included? :P
Which reminds me, I should check on it :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 16, 2015, 11:42:24 PM
Oh, right, I should maybe include that one lol. But yeah the issue is that many of the newer TI community members would start their own team for the aforementioned reasons. But the other problem is that those teams often consisted of programmers who never had programmed before so the sites often had nothing to showcase from the start. But again, in CW's case we had nothing at first either, which is why we remained private/invite-only for almost 2 months prior opening.

EDIT: But again maybe I should not include boards with less than 50 posts. Eg I didn't include The Calc League because they had like 20 posts. http://calcleague.proboards.com/

I also need to check TI-Wizard and CalculatorTI to check if they had enough posts to be added at some point. http://www.tiwizard.com and http://www.calculatorti.com/
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: princetonlion.tibd on June 16, 2015, 11:46:13 PM
Don't include it, it's dead :P

It was for my IRL programming friends, but they all didn't want to make an account :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 17, 2015, 02:00:30 AM
Aah I see. ANd yeah it's hard to convince IRL friends to join an internet forum about calculators. >.<
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 17, 2015, 08:00:55 AM
Yeah especially if they're not that into calculators. Luckily CW has enough off-topic, art and pc game topics too :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 17, 2015, 01:15:30 PM
That too. That said, I did not include forums that had calc boards on them, but with like 99% offtopicness. Eg int10x10 or whatever it was called and JDonald's forums, which had tiny calculator sections, but with like 50 posts out of maybe a thousands. CW and Cemetech are fine, since they have a significant amount of calculator focus and thus, a better reflexion of who hangs out on calculator-related forums.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 17, 2015, 06:07:09 PM
Yeah, I should get my friend to join, he likes to code. (We are 2 of 3 people who actually understand a language in the middle school) O.O
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 17, 2015, 08:51:23 PM
If you get him to join, try to lead by example, though, by not spamming/flooding. :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 18, 2015, 12:10:00 AM
LOL, that might be a good idea :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: princetonlion.tibd on June 18, 2015, 02:39:19 AM
I'll replace Unicorn if needed :trollface:
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 18, 2015, 02:56:49 AM
I can also reset post counts to zero :P

EDIT I have now included Calculator-TI and TI-Wizard in the stats, but I have not updated the 1st post yet. All 0-post years are now gray.

I will also try to update the 2015 column with new stats but I can't promise anything.

EDIT: I just did it with the bigger sites (without saving): TI-Planet leads the TI community for this month and the overall trend seems slightly up despite some drops for certain sites.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 18, 2015, 01:41:59 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 18, 2015, 02:56:49 AM
I can also reset post counts to zero :P

The secret of how DJ always has  the most posts on a forum :trollface:

Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 18, 2015, 10:41:14 PM
WAIT. YOU THINK YOU CAN REPLACE MY AWESOMENESS WITH A NICKNAME? Think again Prince.


Kidding aside, my friend is actually pretty crazy, so he might spam more than me without every seeing me post in real time.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 19, 2015, 07:53:58 AM
Quote from: Unicorn on June 18, 2015, 10:41:14 PM
WAIT. YOU THINK YOU CAN REPLACE MY AWESOMENESS WITH A NICKNAME? Think again Prince.


Kidding aside, my friend is actually pretty crazy, so he might spam more than me without every seeing me post in real time.
Well if he does that then I honestly don't think his account will last long <_< (unless he can control himself of course).
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: princetonlion.tibd on June 19, 2015, 12:11:34 PM

Quote from: Unicorn on June 18, 2015, 10:41:14 PM
WAIT. YOU THINK YOU CAN REPLACE MY AWESOMENESS WITH A NICKNAME? Think again Prince.


Kidding aside, my friend is actually pretty crazy, so he might spam more than me without every seeing me post in real time.
I could always replace nicknames in IRC :P

Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 19, 2015, 12:25:44 PM
/nick unicorntrustmeimtotallynotprincetonlion
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 19, 2015, 05:17:55 PM
Dj., he would probably control himself.

/nick snakeeventhoughidontlikesnakes

EIT: 999! W00T ONE THOUSAND HERE I COME!
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: princetonlion.tibd on June 19, 2015, 08:05:10 PM
Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on June 19, 2015, 12:25:44 PM
/nick unicorntrustmeimtotallynotprincetonlion
I used Un|corn when Unicorn used Unicorn| :P
and I usually say that it's me right after joining the channel
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on June 19, 2015, 09:52:01 PM
Yeah well, I am now Unicorn, so what now?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 20, 2015, 02:07:53 AM
Update: I updated Tout-82 (the original site) stats because I discovered that the board actually started in 2004, not 2006, so I had to split many posts from the 2006 stats.

Also added the amount of boards with 100 posts and higher per year. Pretty sad stats if you ask me, but the good thing is that the community is once again concentrated on larger sites as opposed to 29 different small forums now.

Forums under 100 posts also now have dark blue-gray numbers, while forums with 0 posts are in light blue, to make it easier to find stats of forums with 100 posts or higher.

EDIT: image
(http://img.codewalr.us/tiforumstats7.png)

TODO:
-Add Technicalc forums there
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 26, 2015, 07:36:22 AM
The 2015 statistics have now been updated to include posts from May 30th until now. TI-Planet actually leads June for monthly posts (they had over 3000 since May 30 O.O).

(http://img.codewalr.us/tiforumstats8.png)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Snektron on June 26, 2015, 02:47:32 PM
Cool! I don't know how you get these stats, but it would be cool if you could make some sort of script that gets the post count on each forum
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 26, 2015, 02:49:46 PM
Go Ti-Planet!

I am also curios of how you get these stats?!
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 26, 2015, 04:41:53 PM
For large sites, I just check the last post ID. I have the first post ID of 2015 written down for most boards. For smaller sites (those with like 1 post a week or less), I just count them one by one.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on June 26, 2015, 06:10:47 PM
Oh, that is a good way to do it :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 26, 2015, 09:32:55 PM
Indeed. The only issue is with forums that are literally invaded by spambots. Most of the time, sites get like 1 spam post out of 20 when they're less active, so it doesn't mess up the stats much, but in the case of Ticalcs.net and Alvasoft, during their last years when they were still active, about 99% of the posts were spam, so I was forced to find legit ones and count them one  by one. >.<

Also I better keep up with yAronet posts more, now, if I decide to continue updating this activity chart in the future, because yN no longer displays the total post count of forums now. >.<
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: TheMachine02 on June 28, 2015, 10:13:17 AM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 26, 2015, 07:36:22 AM
The 2015 statistics have now been updated to include posts from May 30th until now. TI-Planet actually leads June for monthly posts (they had over 3000 since May 30 O.O).

I guess that is the french exam effect. The site where pretty much overloaded  :P

But yeah, counting by hand seems pretty much slow and painful  O.O
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 28, 2015, 03:18:14 PM
Yeah that could explain things. That said, they didn't have as much lag as Planète Casio. The latter uses free web hosting. >.<
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Lionel Debroux on June 28, 2015, 03:40:55 PM
Yeah, the huge popularity of the online mViewer GX Creator converter took its toll on the server's responsiveness at times...
Before the 2014-2015 school season, we had identified a variety of improvements and additions. Some of them, e.g. the new ToutMonExam site, were implemented this year by critor and Adriweb. Work started on several others, and yet more items, such as a job queue for mViewer GX Creator, remain to be implemented.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Adriweb on June 28, 2015, 03:45:06 PM
Yeah, for a non-short period of time, the server kept having a generation made about every 5 seconds, the traffic itself is no problem for the server, but the generations... got unexpectedly high.
Anyway, during summer, the post counts probably won't grow much ^^
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 28, 2015, 05:06:34 PM
I hope that generated files were not mostly HP Prime ones. Those can get big really fast O.O

And yeah the community is quieter during Summer unless many people who were busy with school decide to not work too much during vacations.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on July 01, 2015, 07:07:11 AM
There is now a Google docs spreadsheet of the forum activity table! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HRZW1s374I5ExDCcEmd-QJgJwMyt0NrWJvwWF_IWOjI/edit?usp=sharing

I still need to learn how to use it, though. I just imported the .ods file in it. This one includes extrapolated stats for 2015 (although with the Summer lull, sites with fewer active users tend to have an harder time recovering, while other rebound when school starts.)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on July 20, 2015, 02:44:52 AM
I have now updated the 2015 stats to July 19th to see how things evolved since Summer began. I updated both the TI-Story wiki page, as well as my ods file.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on July 20, 2015, 02:54:42 AM
Cool! I'm gonna check it out on TI story now. :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on July 31, 2015, 07:24:02 PM
Semi-bad news: yAronet no longer shows the total amount of posts per sub-forum nor for entire boards. While this should not be a problem with their activity trends, if they do revive and get a massive amount of posts in the future under such circumstances, this means that I will have to exclude yAronet from 2015 stats onward, and that unless I decide to bother spending several hours counting all posts one by one for said year.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Lionel Debroux on July 31, 2015, 07:36:54 PM
Don't worry, the sections of yAronet related to the TI community aren't going to revive...
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on July 31, 2015, 07:45:21 PM
Well, there was a small upsurge in activity last month that lasted just a week, but seemed enough to rack up their 2015 stats by over 60 posts (which is on-par with TI-BASIC Developer and Omnimaga). While this doesn't seem like much, it still took quite a while to count those posts one by one. Now imagine if they suddenly get 300-500 posts >.<

EDIT: I will also need to update TI-84-Plus.com stats because I discovered that they have two forums (although both were inactive this year) and the second one is http://www.ti-84-plus.com//calculatorquestions/questions?start=1300

EDIT: Done. I added a notice in the TI-Story page explaining that the website uses two different boards
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on August 26, 2015, 05:58:07 AM
The statistics have now been updated to August 26, 1:14 AM GMT-5. If you compare the page revision with past ones, you can have a small hint of how quiet Summer usually is in the TI community compared to other periods of the year. However, I just added up every forum together and if I extrapolate the stats for 365 days then the TI community is still up from 2014 levels. Same if I only extrapolate stats of forums that already got over 1000 posts and keep the rest intact.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: utz on August 26, 2015, 08:43:28 PM
Wow, looks like a good year for the TI community for sure :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on August 26, 2015, 09:32:21 PM
Indeed. I wouldn't say it's that good, since the total activity of every single forum combined is actually lower than 2008-09, but the amount of notable programs is still high and since most of the community is now concentrated on a smaller amount of forums, the more active sites are more active than the most active ones in 2008-09.

Some years also had lower signal to noise ratio overall (as in more posts but less program releases) or more off-topicness, such as 2006 and 2008.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on August 28, 2015, 06:51:14 AM
Every year is a good year if there is progress. :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on August 29, 2015, 03:18:56 AM
Indeed, but that progress obviously needs to translate into more progress in later years. In 2013, for example, MaxCoderz got revived for 3 months or so, same thing with Revsoft earlier this year, but it seems like it was their swan song,

The problem is that once Summer ends, some important members don't come back or they never return to their former activity levels, so the TI community is in constant rebuild mode (even 2004 wasn't great around September, other than people coming to ask how to turn their calc ON).
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on August 29, 2015, 07:04:27 AM
But there is always the Die hard Year round Programmers to. :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on August 29, 2015, 07:34:54 AM
Indeed. But this is why it's best that they stick around when they can so it helps big sites transition into the new school year.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 12, 2015, 12:55:57 AM
All forum stats on TI-Story have now been updated to include posts from August 26th to October 11th 2015. Here are the top 10 changes during that time frame:

TI-Planet: 3155
CodeWalrus: 2767
Cemetech: 1775
TI-BD: 308
Omnimaga: 282
Tout-82 (original): 158
yAronet 68K: 94
Tama's Team: 17
Revsoft: 15
Tout-82 (2nd site): 10

http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats


If you combine the total of every forum then extrapolate them to 365 days (multiplying them by 1.28), then you get a total of 73644, which would be an increase over 2014 total (70803)

Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 17, 2015, 05:58:37 AM
This is not directly related to the post stats archival project, but I was curious about which day of the week was the busiest on CW and I took CW graph, applied some filter on it, resized it down with 7 different offset in an image editor then pasted each result side by side. The results were quite interesting:

(http://img.codewalr.us/cwstatsbydayofweek.png)

I do not know how to make a trend line from an image and I am too lazy to manually calculate the average, but basically, what can be noticed is that during Winter and Fall, Mondays and Fridays are much quieter, then near the end of school year, they are often very busy. Weekends are usually the quietest days of the week, but Sunday is a little busier. Also, it seem that activity variations are smaller on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Note, however, that our stats are GMT, so some days might look much busier to you and vice-versa. Typically, Friday evenings are much quieter than anything else, so anyone in Europe probably doesn't notice the impact as much.


What would be interesting is to get the hourly stats by month, as well as our demographics (age range or average age, country, main language, favorite calculator, if into calcs at all, etc). Maybe at one point I'll do a survey.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on December 03, 2015, 08:08:05 PM
Bump: I quickly updated the stats at http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats to include posts from October 11th 20 PM to December 3rd 15 PM GMT-5. It looks like the total at the end of the year will be a bit under 2014, after all (before Summer it seemed to be headed above it but still under 2009). TI-BD is having a nice increase, though, and the original Tout-82 forum broke past the 1000th mark (they're about to merge back with the 2nd forum)


Should I merge both Tout-82 stats like with TI-84plus.com forums once they merge?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 01, 2016, 11:50:20 PM
Update: Stats for 2015 are now complete. The total is higher than 2014, but only by a few hundreds.

http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: alexgt on January 02, 2016, 01:36:43 AM
Nice, That is quite interesting, I believe it will swing back up in a year or two though...
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 02, 2016, 01:40:58 AM
Yeah it probably depends of what kind of games come out for the 84+CE in the future, especially now that an emu and DCS9 are arriving. :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: semiprocoder on January 02, 2016, 04:06:23 AM
Wow codewalrus was one of the highest(and I am pretty sure highest) posted on site. Thats awesome! Also, omninaga fell over 20k posts from 26.6k to a measly 4.4k. Wow.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 02, 2016, 06:03:04 AM
True, but we have to keep in mind that most founding CW members were Omni members who either no longer felt welcome there and/or wanted their old policies back and this eventually culminated into CW creation. But since those members were by far the most active Omni users, the site activity suffered. It would still have done so if CW had never existed, just not as severe (probably between 600 and 1100 posts a month, based on Spring 2007 stats).

Also, most people still go to Omnimaga for Nspire hacking and Axe help. This can be seen in the high amount of topics being created each month and last year they had way more new topics than us this year, even if they had less posts.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 26, 2016, 02:31:13 PM
Does anyone know if there is an easy and fast way to browse Github commit and bug reports discussions? I would like to add Github TI project post statistics to a second list on the TI-Story page.

I would also like to add the TI calculator reddits. Both Github and Reddit would remain into separate lists, to compare.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Adriweb on April 27, 2016, 04:29:44 AM
Yeah, you could probably look at GitHub's API to get properties for issues like comment counts (along with a bunch of other info) - it's available here, for instance on CEmu: https://api.github.com/repos/CE-Programming/CEmu/issues
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 27, 2016, 04:46:14 AM
Thanks for the link. I will have to check if this API is also available for commit comments and decipher what all of this means (if I ever can <_<). From what I could see, this could probably be an issue for issues/commits where the original post or the comments spans multiple years, but those are probably very rare due to the nature of commits/issues resolving, so it shouldn't ruin accuracy too much.

If I or somebody else can manage to make such script or a tool that makes it easier to count comments by year, then all I would need to do is search for all existing Nspire, 82/83/84/85/86/89/92/v200 projects on Github.


Also that begs the question: Traditional forums are a dying breed and not just in the calculator community: SMF support forum used to average at 1500 posts a day in 2009 and now it averages around 150. Forums are being eaten alive by Reddit, Github issues/comments, Wordpress and the like, even though those places lacks any customization and moderation for web masters. Does this mean that CodeWalrus, Cemetech and TI-Planet will have to switch to Discourse/NodeBB/Flarum forum softwares to become more friendly to social network fans or will they have to become Facebook/Reddit groups outright? Flarum has something that resembles a tag system that would fit our needs since we use a topic cloning mod combined with a tag system, but would such new layout deters current users and really help bringing new ones?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on August 01, 2016, 10:35:42 PM
I began adding stats for Jan 1st to August 1 2016 in the TI forum stats page, but I'm not finished yet. I don't know if I will add Casio and HP stats because I was not active enough in those communities and I am sure too much data would be missing to mean anything.

EDIT: Done. You can see the 2016 (so far) result at http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: utz on August 02, 2016, 10:24:06 PM
I see cnCalc (http://www.cncalc.org/) is missing from that list - one of the most active non-English calc forums out there!
Not sure if it matters, but DCF (http://casiofans.de/index.php?sid=81f987943485f3d861a937690423dac7) is also missing. It was a long-running German Casio forum, started back in like, 1998? And closed down in at the end of 2013.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on August 02, 2016, 10:26:17 PM
The reason why cnCalc was not included is because I couldn't figure out how to manually track their 2002-16 statistics yet. This is the same reason why Electroshock Programming and various other small forums were not included and why the stats for some existing sites are missing for some years.

As for DCF it's because the list only includes calc forums with a TI section for the time being.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: utz on August 02, 2016, 10:34:53 PM
Ah, now I realize that the topic is "TI forum activity stats", not "Calc forum activity stats". Whoops :D
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on August 02, 2016, 10:38:21 PM
Yeah the thing is that I did not track down Casio forums activity as much over time. A lot of the data I got from big forums was fetched back in 2010, some even 2009. I'll probably try to fetch some from missing sites or non-TI ones in the future, though, now that TI-Story also covers Casio/HP sites.

Another issue is the annoying Archive.org Robots.txt bug. If, for example, ticalc.org decided to modify their robots.txt to block archive.org or all bots at some point in the future, then the entire archive.org content for ticalc.org from 1996 to 2016 would vanish from public. Same if a site shuts down and the domain name squatter decides to block robots.txt 6 years from now.

EDIT: Looking at cnCalc structure, stats will most likely be estimated from archive.org caches, like with old yAronet stats.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on November 21, 2016, 10:01:05 AM
The table at http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats has been updated to include 2016 posts up to November 21st, 4:40 AM GMT-5.

Judging by what I saw, 2016 looks like it has been MUCH slower than 2014 and 2015 overall >.< (although I noticed a drastic increase in CE projects since the last few months or so). If I extrapolate the total so far, it reaches 55000 posts total.

Something I am curious about, though, is IRC activity over the last 15 years. Maybe @Patrick Davidson would be able to run scripts to check #ti, #tcpa, #tiasm, etc, and @Sorunome might be able to do so with #omnimaga . I wish I didn't lose all my 2005-10 Omni logs >.<
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: critor on November 21, 2016, 09:40:26 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on November 21, 2016, 10:01:05 AMJudging by what I saw, 2016 looks like it has been MUCH slower than 2014 and 2015 overall >.< (although I noticed a drastic increase in CE projects since the last few months or so).
Yes. With only 325 days, it should have been just 10% lower.
In the end, it's quite lower than that..

About projects, I'm not sure.
Last year, I had released CE projects to news about almost on a daily basis. There was always some new game/tool on TI-Planet, Cemetech, ticalc.org or Codewalrus.
This year, a whole week can pass without any new CE release...

I'm not saying that there is less development.
Maybe the development is focusing on updating already released projects... or on bigger projects which need more time before a release.

But there are still much less new CE projects being released this year from my point of view.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on November 21, 2016, 09:52:32 PM
Yeah, by extrapolating I think we have a 15K posts drop total over last two years. Something to keep in mind, however, is that the 4x3 contest on CW last year boosted activity considerably in May and June 2015 and on Omnimaga in June-July 2014, they got a particularly prolific poster with high noise-to-signal ratio (I think he had 800 posts in a single month).

Projects-wise, CEmu and the C toolchain really gave CE dev a boost and I am sure that the project builder helped, although it's probably not as known as CEmu because many people are scared of French. I remember at one point last year where after you released Androides and others, there was no more sign of life for any CE project. If you remember a PM I sent you I had even begun to think that the CE was DOA. Something I notice, though, is a sharp decline in TI-BASIC dev. For the amount of projects we would probably need to check the release timelines.

As for the TI-Nspire CX scene, I think we can pretty much write it off as dead. TI alienated most of it the same way a certain community member alienated the 68K community a decade before. Which is why I wish that nSDL was ported to the CE (so that some of the lower-end SDL games get portd easily).


But I also notice that many people prefer posting screenshots of their projects on IRC and shoutboxes nowadays, so we would need the yearly IRC stats to judge, especially of the following channels (some of which switched networks multiple times over the years):

EFnet: #omnimaga, #codewalrus, #cemetech, #ltwttf, #tiasm, #ti, #tcpa (although it's no longer a TI channel since 2010), #tibasic, #tifreakware, #calchaven, #ez80dev, #CEmu (sp?), #inspired, #prizm, #nspire-lua
Omninet: #omnimaga (I think both were separate for a while), #omnimaga-fr, #omnimaga-nl
United-TI: #unitedti, #omnimaga, #tifreakware, #calchaven
Worldnet: #cemetech, #tigcc, #tigen, #yaronet
Freequests: #tigcc, #inspired
TI-Planet shoutbox

EDIT: CodeWalrus had 8709 IRC lines in 2014, with 8710 being the ID of the first 2015 one. 253471 is the ID of the first post of 2016 (EDIT 520068 is the first of 2017), which means we had 244762 IRC posts in 2015 and 224556 in 2016 until Nov 21st. If extrapolated, this means that #CodeWalrus activity actually increased in 2016. We also have very close to the same amount of topics as last year and on pace to have more, since more people have asked questions.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on November 29, 2016, 08:11:45 AM
On a side note, this isn't directly related to the stats themselves, but I noticed via the Wayback Machine that at some point in 2004, some of the Forum TI-Ring URLs (https://web.archive.org/web/20040606011817/http://forumti.timouss.firstream.net/ ) automatically redirected to TI-Gen forums. I never noticed that back in the days, so not all URLs might have been updated, but this can't be a coincidence. I think it simply got replaced by TI-Gen (and not merged, since TI-Gen started with zero posts). Also, this was the forum used by TI-89 Clairnet, according to the Wayback machine (their forum/FAQ no longer shows the forum URL since 2007). The weird part also is that despite being for all calcs, I recall most discussions there being about 68K calcs. I wonder if @Lionel Debroux knows anything about it?

Also, the Z80 forum at http://www.yaronet.com/forums/493 used to be a standalone forum located at forum89.vvlr.com used by most French z80 sites and its layout was almost identical to Forum TI-Ring, except with a blue frame instead of gray and the Z80 topics were in a separate section. It merged with yAronet in 2004, but most old posts vanished within the next few years (I suspect this might have been a bug with the database conversion script used by yAronet or a data loss. Nowadays the topics are listed again, but gives 404 errors when clicked). Also, that forum became Z80-only in 2006, with its 68K section being merged into the existing 68K yAronet board.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on November 29, 2016, 08:17:28 AM
Your should talk to all the site admins about getting irc logs... I would be quite interested in looking at that activity.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on November 29, 2016, 08:47:14 AM
Yeah. That said, I think @Patrick Davidson has logs of about 30 TI-related channels dating all the way back in 1999. He could probably be able to get the amount of text lines of any given year per channel via some commands, scripts or something. I don't know much about that stuff myself, though, especially if it involves separate files. As for Omni, @Sorunome  has full OmnomIRC access and could probably run some SQL queries to check. If Patrick Davidson started idling in #ltwttf/#cemetech since their founding then he could probably provide stats from there too. Of course that's if he's willing to help, though, plus I am unsure how much work this would be. The data would not be accurate due to counting joins and parts worded differently accross different IRC clients over the years, but it would still give an idea of TI community IRC activity over time.

Also, both #ltwttf and #cemetech would need to be grouped, because both were basically the same. They just were forced to use #ltwttf in 2005 because somebody decided to take over the #cemetech channel to prevent Kerm from putting Cemetech IRC channel on EFnet at the time (it was initially on Worldnet). Same with the Omni channels that got name changes, such as #omnimaga-fr becoming #fr on Omninet, or used multiple networks with synced discussions between networks. As for #tcpa, its TI discussion moved to #ti in early 2010, but I heard that BrandonW still occasionally discussed some calculator stuff there afterwards. So maybe it should be included anyway?
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Sorunome on November 29, 2016, 09:42:05 AM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on November 29, 2016, 08:47:14 AM
[...] The data would not be accurate due to counting joins and parts worded differently accross different IRC clients over the years, but it would still give an idea of TI community IRC activity over time.
[...]
Actually OIRC stores if the message type is join/part/action/normal message/nickchange and thelike
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on November 29, 2016, 09:44:20 AM
Oh I see. THat said, to be consistent with other IRC channels, including joins/parts/quits would be better IMHO (except the forum logins/logouts)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Sorunome on November 29, 2016, 11:09:00 AM
Shouldn't those be easily filterable via regex anyways?

EDIT: I mean that you just exclude join/parts from all logs
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on November 29, 2016, 02:20:33 PM
Do what you want, then :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on December 05, 2016, 04:41:15 AM
Some other stats: The amount of programs featured for each Ticalc.org POTY, from 2003 to 2016:

















Year TI-80 TI-81 TI-82 83+/84+ 84+CSE 84+CE TI-86 TI-68K Nspire PC TOTAL
2003 ...8..117.632
2004 ..120..547.376
2005 ...7...24.435
2006 ...8..15.216
2007 ...5...3.210
2008 .......2..2
2009 .1.7...4.517
2010 .2118...106138
2011 1..8...27321
2012 ...15...13.19
2013 ...158..418246
2014 ...11*7...6.24
2015 ...37**7.21.20
2016 ...1412..4.21

*KnightOS was a separate category (multi-platform), but was mostly 83+ at the time, so I put it there
**CSE and CE BASIC programs were in a separate category that year, but most of them were CSE-only at the time, so I put them there.



Something to keep in mind is that over the years, ticalc.org experienced periods where they lacked an active news editor, as well as two iterations of Nomination November, which resulted into many programs being featured a few years later. However, for the most part, this should give you an idea of how many notable programs were released there over the years (in 2008, there was literally almost nothing) and the evolution from calc to calc. I didn't include POTM, because back then the criterias to feature something were much lower (for example, a quadratic solver could have been featured).
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 02, 2017, 01:21:55 AM
So it definitively seems like the community trends favor chats more nowadays

CodeWalrus:
2015
Topics: 767
Posts: 26936
IRC lines: 244762

2016
Topics: 787
Posts: 21164
IRC lines: 266597


TI-Planet
2015: 1720+ topics, ≈ 18000 posts
2016: 1510+ topics, ≈ 16500 posts
They have no stats for the shoutbox, but apparently its activity was higher this year. https://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19416&p=211122#p211122

I'll try to update TI-Story later.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: xMarminq_ on January 02, 2017, 01:34:10 AM
Yay! Walrii is growing!
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 02, 2017, 01:34:46 AM
Quote from: xMarminq_ on January 02, 2017, 01:34:10 AM
Yay! Walrii is growing!
You mean :walrii: himself or CodeWalrus? D:
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: p2 on January 03, 2017, 11:53:38 PM
the mighty walrus grows with us O.O

Edt: I'm getting fat...
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 04, 2017, 04:43:39 AM
You're an actual :walrii: , after all? O.O
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: p4nix on January 04, 2017, 08:06:53 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 04, 2017, 04:43:39 AM
You're an actual :walrii: , after all? O.O
Sh** is about to happen if you take that 'staff' thingy too serious, you should know that @DJ Omnimaga ;)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 04, 2017, 09:23:59 PM
I was kidding as well @p4nix :P

We never know, though :trollface:


Also I'm a bit late but I finally updated the 2016 forum posting stats to include the entire year: http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: GalacticPirate on January 05, 2017, 12:08:21 PM
OK, so here are the variations in activity for all main (ie above 100 posts :p) sites, compared to 2015:
1. Codewalrus; 21,164 posts; ▼-21.43%
2. TI-Planet; 16,909 posts; ▼-11.65%
3. Cemetech; 11,155 posts; ▼-25.54%
4. Omnimaga; 1,959 posts; ▼-55.53%
5. TI-Basic Developper; 1,331 posts; ▼-52.12%
6. Tout82 (Original); 793 posts; ▼-34.79%
7. yAronet (combined); 285 posts ▼-39.87%
8. TI-Calc.org; 165 posts ▲+81.32%
9. Tout82 (Second site); 159 posts ▼-67.81%
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 05, 2017, 03:17:32 PM
That was quite a massive drop this year >.< . This is why we need to encourage developers to not stick exclusively to Github and other repos or chatrooms to showcase their project progress <_<.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Unicorn on January 05, 2017, 03:25:00 PM
Or, maybe, take Unicorn's steam account away. :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: GalacticPirate on January 05, 2017, 05:06:13 PM
Actually I lol'd whan I saw TI-Calc.org's post count almost doubled :p
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 05, 2017, 05:25:12 PM
Quote from: Unicorn on January 05, 2017, 03:25:00 PM
Or, maybe, take Unicorn's steam account away. :P
And @Snektron account too :P

Unless you both decide to make Steam games :P


Quote from: STV on January 05, 2017, 05:06:13 PM
Actually I lol'd whan I saw TI-Calc.org's post count almost doubled :p
That's because they did not have a news editor from March 2015 to October 2015. :P
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: critor on January 07, 2017, 12:12:40 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 05, 2017, 03:17:32 PM
Quote from: STV on January 05, 2017, 12:08:21 PM
OK, so here are the variations in activity for all main (ie above 100 posts :p) sites, compared to 2015:
1. Codewalrus; 21,164 posts; ▼-21.43%
2. TI-Planet; 16,909 posts; ▼-11.65%
3. Cemetech; 11,155 posts; ▼-25.54%
4. Omnimaga; 1,959 posts; ▼-55.53%
5. TI-Basic Developper; 1,331 posts; ▼-52.12%
6. Tout82 (Original); 793 posts; ▼-34.79%
7. yAronet (combined); 285 posts ▼-39.87%
8. TI-Calc.org; 165 posts ▲+81.32%
9. Tout82 (Second site); 159 posts ▼-67.81%
That was quite a massive drop this year >.< .
So what I was feeling (so few CX/CE projects being released this year compared to last year) was coming from somewhere...

I wouldn't say massive.
The drop in percentage is much higher for web sites which were already old/unmaintained/unsupported/inactive.

Very impressive to see how Omnimaga still manages to go lower when being already so low, with a respectable -53.53% drop percentage.

The new tout82 project seems to be dead since birth too. As it was publicly presented as being the last issue, I spent hours last year converting their old CMS forum to a phpBB database, did provide them the new image, and got no news ever again after that. :(
The TI-82 Advanced for France being completely locked down and the only approved 82 model for 2018+ exams probably didn't help either for a 82-only oriented website.


But it's still a significant drop, yes.
In such context, there is no room for any more division in the TI community.
But it doesn't mean that people who built a new website because they felt very unwanted somewhere else should feel guilty, nor that they should go back at any cost either.
It's up to people who throw some/all of their members out to apologize, change their behaviour and fix their stupid mistakes.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 07, 2017, 03:57:43 PM
Well to be honest, I am not surprised about Omnimaga's decline @critor , as they basically used United-TI's final 5 years of management as a blueprint since I stepped down (to the point where even the "overhaul" of the download section and URL changes were followed to the letter). They don't even have a single admin that posted in more than 5 different days this last few months. If CW staff was to do the same, our activity would drop even faster. Things would be way different if Sorunome was the leader rather than just support staff.

As for the amount of CE projects, I think the reason why I might have the impression that there is an higher amount this year is because on CW it took until 2016 before the calculator finally takes off and I haven't checked other sites as often.

If CW had not opened, the total numbers would be even worse. This is why we need to keep our welcoming atmosphere intact and encourage people to learn programming.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Adriweb on January 07, 2017, 04:09:50 PM
Quote from: critor on January 07, 2017, 12:12:40 PMso few CX/CE projects being released this year compared to last year
Do you have a source/numbers?

At least on TI-Planet (CW stats are welcome if you have some, and ticalc as well if possible), the number of uploads (marked with the following category in the archive) are:
CE:
- 2015: 160
- 2016: 214 (+33.8%)
Nspire:
- 2015: 171
- 2016: 180 (-5.3%)

1st conclusion: Well, 2016 has had much more content than 2015 for the CE, and basically the same for the Nspire.

Or maybe it depends what you call "projects". If I filter out anything with less than 25 downloads, not to count the tiny things for instance, we have these numbers of uploads:
(even though the ones from 2015 have had 1 more year to reach the threshold, in this example... to it's actually biased)
CE:
- 2015: 142
- 2016: 136 (-4.2%)
Nspire:
- 2015: 150
- 2016: 107 (-28.7%)

2nd and probably more accurate conclusion: While there's much more content in raw quantity, there is less content generating a lot of downloads for the Nspire, and a negligible difference, for the CE

Let's note that some "big games", like the ones from Patrick Davidson, also get often updated, so in theory this is "activity"/"content", but we don't see it directly in the numbers above.

Also if actual content/activity in 2016 is less than 2015, TI-Planet's 2016 stats (https://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=19416) indicate that raw visits/visitors keep going up, like every year. So with more visits and less forum posts, the conclusion is that there are simply more and more "observers" rather than "actors".
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 07, 2017, 04:16:11 PM
Yeah people seems less interested in forum posting nowadays and more into real-time chat or lurkibg, which can be seen with our respective increases in chat posts. @Adriweb do you have the stats for how many lines of text TI-Planet shoutbox got per year from 2011 to 2016?

On CW shoutbox I see more and more authors posting screenshots of their progress without even making a forum post, even when it's a major update, and this in turn generates less activity
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: critor on January 07, 2017, 04:24:03 PM
Your point of view is just different, Adriweb.

January-June 2016 was great.
September-December 2016 not so great...

By mixing both periods in your stats (when the users/developers are changing/leaving/joining between June and September), you're just masking the problem IMO, delaying it by 1 year.

Last school-year, I had to *choose* which CE/CX project to feature on ticalc.org.
This school-year, I have to *search/wait* for CE/CX projects featurable on ticalc.org.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 07, 2017, 04:27:38 PM
June 2016 was a disaster activity-wise. We went from 3000 posts to 1500 in a single year difference in June of both years.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Adriweb on January 07, 2017, 04:30:22 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 07, 2017, 04:16:11 PM@Adriweb do you have the stats for how many lines of text TI-Planet shoutbox got per year from 2011 to 2016?
With no filtering whatsoever:
2011: 126k
2012: 405k
2013: 499k
2014: 467k
2015: 538k
2016: 640k
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 07, 2017, 04:31:17 PM
Darn, that's quite a drastic increase. O.O CW went up from like 245000 to 266000
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: critor on January 07, 2017, 04:34:25 PM
Then we can assume most new members prefer shoutboxes to forums.

So it's not that the activity is lower, it's that it's changing/moving.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 07, 2017, 05:14:33 PM
Yeah, and many online users prefer Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and other centralized places to forums/older chat mediums, so this cuts off the potential userbase even further. Sad, considering those social networks have a total lack of customization. (unlike forums where you can change the CSS, layout, etc)


Also @critor something else to take into account about CodeWalrus is this: From January to May 2015, we had a staff member who averaged around 400-450 posts a month. Afterwards, his activity decreased significantly and he usually showed up about one week per month until finally stepping down in October. Then in February 2016 or so one of our other significantly active user disappeared as well. Also, the first months of CW had a lot of flood compared to later on, as some of our early users had activity that often matched the top posting users, but with plenty of low-quality posts. As those users increased their post quality, this obviously meant their level of activity would drop. And we probably did not get enough new members interested in forums to offset the activity drop over last year.

Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 07, 2017, 08:21:53 PM
Semi-major update: I started listing IRC channels and important shoutboxes to the post stats page in a second table below the forum one. However, the only stats available so far are #codewalrus and TI-Planet shoutbox, so if anybody has IRC logs of the other listed channels that could be sent my way (with line-breaks for each line of text of course) so that I can track down the amount of lines per year, then it would be appreciated. Since #cemetech and #tigcc (and most likely the older inactive #inspired) channels disallows the sharing of logs for the most part, someone who got logs might need to run them through a script themselves and send me the lines per year stats instead. I don't mind if the joins/parts are included, since it's just to give a rough idea of how active each channel were.

http://tistory.wikidot.com/forumstats (see at the bottom)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: p2 on January 10, 2017, 03:23:16 PM
I know it's a bit early for that, but I can't wait to see our stats at the end of 2017  :love:
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 10, 2017, 11:37:12 PM
I don't know, but based on the trend, I kinda expected 15000-21000 in 2017 but it always depends of how many people are absent during Summer and how many of our hi-school users move to college next Fall (and from past experience, those seems to disappear more often when they live in America). It's also hard to base ourselves on the early 2015 spike because back then we had three mass-posters (besides me) and the 4x3 contest. Also, I think I should find a way to include the IRC activity stats inside the board stats page if that's feasible one day.
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: p2 on January 11, 2017, 09:53:11 AM
well now we have you (AKA mad posting machine) plus me plus a few other super-active users, I'm looking forward to it ^^
also yess, an IRC activity log would be cool ^^
(cant we just add a statistic of the filesize of the monthly logs? :) Rather inaccurate, but at least it will give us a hint on the direction we're going (increasing//decreasing activity). That shoulr be rather easy to do :)
Title: Re: The TI forum activity stats archival project (2002-present)
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 14, 2017, 03:21:27 PM
Erm the thing about me being a post machine is that I actually posted twice as much when CW opened than right now :P

As for IRC activity logs I guess maybe @Juju could implement a /stats command. But yeah overall we got the amount of lines per year which can help giving an indication.