Information currently gathered by jcwren at the Perlmonks site about users, experience, location, etc. is fun and interesting.

At some point, I'd like to gather information about Perlmonk network statistics, where I mean network in the graph-theoretic sense. It seems plausible to me, for instance, that for reasonable notions of connectivity of node, Perlmonks forms a small-world network . It would be fun to compute vertex degree distributions, average distance, etc., and compare against other online communities.

To do this, however, would require traversing all the nodes of the Perlmonks site and recording threads and perhaps scores as edge attributes.

Doing so in a simple-minded manner would probably get me banned, and rightly so, as I would be torturing an already overburdened server.

I ask for your advice on the gentlest manner in which to probe Perlmonks. Some possibilities I have thought of are

Or is such an idea simply ill-advised and should be dropped?

-Mark

In reply to Best way to traverse all Perlmonks nodes? by kvale

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