I'm diving a little deeper into R, so I needed a dataset to play with. Seems the first and last activity of a subset of WF members is easy enough for me to enter into a spreadsheet. This is all public info if you are logged in; I can't see this info for members who have restricted profiles. See attached file (updated as I add more people). Time increases on the x-axis. Members are sorted by first appearance date (registration date) from the bottom up (still working on sorting the other way, but I did at least get it to stop sorting alphabetically). Data file looks like this: Name,Date Chuck,2004-03-23 Chuck,2014-12-03 Elwood,2004-03-23 Elwood,2014-12-03 Chris,2004-03-23 Chris,2014-03-31 Aurora,2004-03-23 Aurora,2014-12-03 Jeriko,2004-03-23 Jeriko,2005-12-24 gul,2004-03-23 gul,2014-12-03
If anyone wants to help enter data, I can send you a link to a spreadsheet on Google Drive. If you are worried about your identity showing up under the list of users, you can use Incognito Mode (Chrome) or similar, and you'll just show up as Anonymous. The alternative is for one of the technical staff to send me useful data from the database directly. With an export of the User and Postdate fields from the posts table, for example, we could build a beanplot showing how people's posting has varied through time (posts per unit time). The reason the bars on the chart look so weird right now is that I only have two dates for each member: registration date and "last active" date. If this doesn't seem "creativey" enough, mods can feel free to move.
Yeah. I've done this another way before, but it takes more finagling. The beanplot package is relatively simple.
It might be, but that isn't reflected on this graph. The skinny lines in there are an artifact of just using two data points with a plot that isn't designed for that.
File in first post has been replaced/updated. This way I won't have a ton of duplicates floating around.
Can you explain what we're looking at? I assume each line's extent along the X-axis represents the period of time that user was active. What is the Y-axis within each line? Posting volume?
Think of it as no y-axis. It's an artifact of the plot that thickness changes. I am looking for a different visualization for this type of data (all the questions are good feedback).
Bick, I think that's because I was entering people in order of registration date number of posts, except for some people at the tail end. So the gap in there represents the folks with less than 600 or so posts that I haven't yet entered. Since post count usually coincides with registration date, it shows up like this.
Another list I didn't make! So many long gone users... It makes me wonder what this board would be like now if none of those people had left and our membership had kept building and building. Definitely miss some of the different viewpoints from folks like Ms Albert, TKO, Lethesoda, markb, Herpetolgist, Reno Floyd, etc One interesting thing I noticed. If you zoom out of the graph and look at the whole thing at once, you notice that most of the people who joined prior to 2006 are still here.. but after that you notice that many people who joined since then did not stick around as long... and it gets worse as time goes. As an example, Federal Farmer is a relative n00b and he was ready to quit the place after just a few months here. He is back now of course and ultimately decided not to wimp out But it seems like the core group of people who joined back in 2004 are still here. Others since then have come and gone....
Zor, I couldn't see your profile when I was going through them all, so I skipped you. It looks like you joined 2013-12-28 though.
Again, I haven't updated any of the data for over a year, but here it is sorted by when people stopped posting.