Re: Tracking popularity of Perl discussion topics

Programmatically going through all perlmonks.org threads and classifying them, and storing them in a table is one thing, but outside the site itself will be of marginal use versus effort.

Consider these issues:

Treads' popularity changes. Will you regenerate your table every day? week? month?
Will you be the only one using the table? If you publish it on-line with links to threads, your page in effect becomes part of perlmonks.org.
Is it a good idea to put more load on an already very loaded server? We're nearing 300K nodes.

Maybe a proposal about an extra thread indexing scheme could be made to site maintainters. If the proposal finds enough support, the change might be implemented.

Myself, I am at least curious about what the top-rated threads are.

Comment on Re: Tracking popularity of Perl discussion topics

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Tracking popularity of Perl discussion topics by allolex (Curate) on Sep 09, 2003 at 06:13 UTC
You bring up some very interesting problems and a good suggestion. At the risk of stating the obvious, any solution creating more than a little server load would have to be tossed out. That means an external server and cooperation with the Monastery developers. The popularity changes issue is a feature. It is possible to give exactly those statistics you mentioned, daily (within 24 hours of posting), weekly, and monthly. I would be interested to know when the average falloff for nodes is, i.e. when the votes stop trickling and being a slow drip. You could then generate something like "these are the thread topics that keep coming up" or "these topics were mentioned once and never again", along with the popularity of the threads. I think the setup would have to be a bit like jcwren's Perl Monks Statistics site, a part of the Monastery. I don't see where metainformation about the site could be anything other than an extension of it. :) -- Allolex	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re: Re: Tracking popularity of Perl discussion topics
by allolex (Curate) on Sep 09, 2003 at 06:13 UTC

You bring up some very interesting problems and a good suggestion.

At the risk of stating the obvious, any solution creating more than a little server load would have to be tossed out. That means an external server and cooperation with the Monastery developers.

The popularity changes issue is a feature. It is possible to give exactly those statistics you mentioned, daily (within 24 hours of posting), weekly, and monthly. I would be interested to know when the average falloff for nodes is, i.e. when the votes stop trickling and being a slow drip. You could then generate something like "these are the thread topics that keep coming up" or "these topics were mentioned once and never again", along with the popularity of the threads.

I think the setup would have to be a bit like jcwren's Perl Monks Statistics site, a part of the Monastery. I don't see where metainformation about the site could be anything other than an extension of it. :)

--
Allolex

[reply]