A few months ago (end of July) we had an intrusion into an old PerlMonks database that created and continues to create an on-going discussion and strong emotions. The question I'd like to know is what material impact has the password debacle had on PerlMonks?

I'd like to know our gut feelings and I'd like to put some numbers behind that. Usually when someone has an idea for an interesting new set of site stats they code it up and then present a post to show it off. But I want to reverse the process. Before I start coding or make requests for missing information, I'd like to discuss this.

What differences have you noticed, if any? Consider site traffic volume, composition of users visiting, quality of questions and responses, number of nodes. Is there anything missing from this list? What other indicators should be considered?

Any attempt to quantify our gut observations is likely to be ambiguous at best. Numbers never tell the whole story. Worse yet, to quantify something we often need to use a proxy that only partially correlates with the behavior we want to measure.

However, observation is vulnerable to issues of salience and sometimes wishful thinking. It is human nature to see what we want to see. But even when we try to be objective, things have to catch our attention for us to observe them. We tend to give more weight to the things we care about than the things we don't. What numbers would give us objective information that we could use to counter bias in our observations?

Here are some of my preliminary ideas. I'd like to see before and after trends in the following statistics. I emphasize the word "trend" because there could be normal seasonal variations in PM traffic and I wouldn't want to confuse that with impact analysis.

What I'd like to know is: did the exploit change the behavior of monks in any way? Is the impact, if any, primarily among experienced regular users or occassional and/or low level users?

If for example, the impact is primarly in the rate of non-spam new user creation, I would surmise that we likely have suffered significant PR damage (or we have an SEO problem). If long term members are visiting less often, voting less regularly, or posting less frequently I might worry about loss of trust in the established Perl community. I would hope that such numbers would show no statistically significant impact. But I think it is important to know, even if the results are scary or painful. If there is damage, we need to correct it. It is impossible to know the right course of action unless we understand the nature of that damage.

What do you want to know? What would you do to measure it? What implications would you draw from the data? What corrective action would that imply?

Best, beth

In reply to Making assessments by ELISHEVA

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