darkSpyro

first off: darkspyro is kill

This ain't gonna be the huge amount of math I did last time, at least not now. Just a year in review type thing. I'm bored, okay?

All numbers are as of midnight on December 31st, 2015, US Central time.

I'll start with the fact that 2,089 accounts were created this year, only 764(36.57%) were ever activated, however. This brings the total number of accounts up to 27,946(14219 of those are activated accounts).

This means that in 2015 an average of ~6 accounts were made per day and ~2 of those were activated per day.


There's no record I can find of the exact sitewide post count on Jan 1st of 2015 but I found a number for Jan 2nd(1,675,111) and the number for today(Jan 2nd, 2016 my time(2,017,734)) so I'll use that as my one year period.

Using these numbers you can figure that 342,623 posts were made this year and 10,824 topics were created this year.(the latter I actually calculated using the table below lol)

This can be broken down more by forum section so here we go:





Those are the 2 main things, I think. If I come up with something else I'll add it in later. I was gonna do a comparison of this year to other years but I'd have to see that that data actually exists first.

I can already see people going to the mobile game sections to post for fun and inflate the numbers for 2016.

we've made over 148,921 funposts in the year of 2015

congratulations stuff and nonsense.

Might I ask how you compile all this data and stuff? Like this and all those site resources you find, how'd you get them?

I'm just genuinely curious.

Quote: StriderSwag

Might I ask how you compile all this data and stuff? Like this and all those site resources you find, how'd you get them?

I'm just genuinely curious.

To figure out how many accounts were created this year I actually just went by user ID's(ID of last account made in 2015 minus ID of first made in 2015.). As for how many were activated I looked at the user list and counted up all the ones with a join date in 2015. This does mean that banned and suspended accounts are part of the inactivated category but I figure there's a relatively small amount of those it won't away things much.

As for the post increases over the year, I just got lucky that there was an archived version of the main forum page from approximately a year ago. From there it's just a bunch of subtraction.


(this black line is neat so imma keep using it)

By site resources I assume you mean when I post topics with the images used on site and such. Sometimes I get bored so I'll open up the inspect element/web developer tools/what have you. (I use Chrome 99% of the time but I assume it's the same on other browsers) 2 of the tabs on the box that opens up are what I focus on, Sources and Resources. On the Resources tab there'll be a folder named frames, inside that another folder with the name of whatever comes between the /spyro/ and the ? in the url of the page you're on. Inside that a folder named images, in this is a list of every image that appears on the current page and a lot is in there(the Christmas stuff for example).


The sources tab I mentioned earlier is where I found mostly everything else. In here you'll have a javascript document, a jquery document(just one enormous line of code, I have no idea what it does), and a css stylesheet. The css is the important part because essentially it's a long list of all the formatting to be applied on the page. All the header images and other things are found in here.(headers are .jpg are everything else is .png). The important thing about image url's you find in here is that they're stubs so you'll need to add "forum.darkspyro.net to the front of each one.


Some stuff I didn't find this way though. The usused buttons(,, ) I found by just dicking around with the urls of the buttons that are there. In this case I took the url of the bold button: Code:

http://forum.darkspyro.net/images/button_b.png

and changing the letter at the end. S, U, and the word Code lead to images so that was cool.



I feel like you may also have been referring to how I collect my data in a general sense so here goes.
For anything involving ranks, gems, account age, join date, etc. I need a copy of the gem count and join date of every user. I get this data in possibly the most tedious way ever, I go to the site's list of users and copy and paste the table on every one of the 200+ pages into one huge Excel spreadsheet. Excel is really good for all the brute force calculation(sums, averages, etc.). I only made my laptop freeze up once lol.

14000 rows...

For the things like gender ratio, signature length, and other weird little things I did I once again did things in an incredibly tedious way. I just went around the forum recording people's gender, avatar and signature into another spreadsheet until I had a sufficient sample size.

There's a lot of handy Excel functions I used that I can explain if anyone would like to know.


This turned into a lot longer of a post then I expected but oh well. It's literally 4:20 in the morning right now so I hope I communicated effectively. If not any anyone has questions I'll be here tomorrow morning(err, today morning I guess).

I did the math on how many topics each Skylanders game had relative to how much of a time advantage they had.

Trap Team had the most, SuperChargers was a close second though.