Extra Statistics

[Carnage]

It'd be nice to see some extra statistics related to installs.

1. If members can specify how many forums they installed the mod on; not just that they have installed it - as many members probably have multiple forums. This would lead to two numbers, total installs and unique installs.

2. give a third number on developers profiles for unique installers (eg if a member has installed two mods by an author they only count once towards this stat)

3. an 'amazon' style members who installed this mod also installed x,y and z.

Although none of the mods on vborg are commercial, I still feel a need to 'sell' my mods to potential users. Instead of money many developers get a sense of pride that x people have installed their product and statistics like these aside from just being interesting, can help 'sell' a mod to a wider audience.

[Paul M]

1. The reason we dont allow one person to install a mod multiple times is because people would simply abuse it to boost install counts. I dont see the use of two counts.

2. I dont really understand this ?

3. I understand what your saying here, but Im not sure how easy this would be to extract, or where we would display it.

[Carnage]

To further explain 2:

If I release 5 mods. They each have an install count. Member A might have installed 4 of my mods, whereas member B only 1; the current count would say 5 total installs. The statistic would be count("select distinct userid from installs where developer = 'Carnage-'") giving the number of unique members that have installed at least one of my mods.

As for 3, display it along side the similar threads (above or below or to the side) Extracting said information is simple enough: "select distinct modid from mods join installs on modid=modid where installerid in (SELECT installerid from installs WHERE modid = 'this mod')" you could do something fancy to order that query by installs and display the top 5. Depending on the table structure could be a little heavy as a query; might be prudent to cache the results for a day or so.

[Paul M]

Still not sure im understanding (2).

This is a count of how many different people has installed any of your mods ?

If so, I dont quite see the purpose or usefulness of this ?

[Carnage]

Yes, that is pretty much what i was getting at.

There is very little point to most statistics, they are just interesting numbers. In this case it can point towards a trend of 'customer loyalty' towards a certain developer :)

[BSMedia]

1. The reason we dont allow one person to install a mod multiple times is because people would simply abuse it to boost install counts. I dont see the use of two counts.


It's rather unfortunate that you don't see a need for it, and its pretty much decided by that factor. I could understand you're point about boosting install counts if they actually meant something or there was a golden number a coder had to reach to arrive in coder heaven :rolleyes: but thats not the case, it's a pretty meaningless number and if people want to sit there and inflate it all day than who cares.

A possible fix would be a simple check at vB.com with the number of licenses a user owns under their account, and limiting the install clicks to that number.

It's pretty sad the largest adjustment this site has made in 3-4 years is increasing private message storage.

[King Kovifor]

A possible fix would be a simple check at vB.com with the number of licenses a user owns under their account, and limiting the install clicks to that number.

vB.org doesn't have that kind of access. Our licensing script checks a script over at vB.org giving them an email address. If there is atleast 1 valid license to that email that has authorized vBulletin.org access, it returns "yes" or "true" or something similar. OTher than that, we have nothing.

[Paul M]

We have no access to know how many licences a person has, not does it work quite like KK mentioned. Quite simply, a script on the server runs every so often, matching the e-mails in users profiles here against the licenced e-mails at vb.com, the users primary usergroup is checked and updated as necessary (directly in the vb.org database).

It's pretty sad the largest adjustment this site has made in 3-4 years is increasing private message storage.
Nonsense of course, but feel free to believe what you will.

[Carnage]

The potential for abuse is the reason you maintain the old statistic as well.

While we are at it, is there any way for a developer to get a list of the members who've installed it? I know it currently displays anyone who has installed the mod in the thread when they post but know of no way to get this list otherwise.

This list combined with a profile field for 'number of boards you own/admin' Could allow me to determine ballpark figures for this statistic myself.

Statistics and trends are useful to know, and vborg contains a wealth of information about various things. Two useful things I could gather from such information are: 1. Which mods to spend time on improving (eg to improve a mod thats not used much, or to provide more benefit to a greater number of users) 2. Are any of my mods viable to offer commercial services on (eg support, customizations, 'power' versions) .

If I have a mod thats installed by 100 people, its worth some time adding new features. If i've got a mod thats only installed by 1 person, maybe its not... however IF that one person happens to have 100 boards, it may be even more worth spending time on, as if that one person wants customizations etc actively maintaining the mod makes them more likely to approach me to do the work instead of hiring an external developer.

[Paul M]

While we are at it, is there any way for a developer to get a list of the members who've installed it? I know it currently displays anyone who has installed the mod in the thread when they post but know of no way to get this list otherwise.
No, there isnt. This has been a personal desire of mine for years, but its always been blocked by the argument that if you know who has installed a mod, and then the mod has an exploit, you basically have a list of exploitable forums.

[vbenhancer]

Paul is completely right about the usage we can do of the statistics... exploits and harassment, we all know.

btw, some stats i'd like to see: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=230716

.. people always requested this... a lot of coders are used to let their old versions on the site here because they want the count of downloads... aside of the number of installs, the total of downloads could be very useful... we already have the indication of who downloaded the latest version, so we could add that count like " latest version X downloads, Y installs "... THIS is more instructive than the simple X installs that are related to nothing...

btw, i like stats not because of my ego, but because i want to know if it worth the effort to code extras or to support it. most of my releases are support-less because they do not need support... but some guys want direct interaction with the downloaders to see if they can work with them to add features or something... if you always support one single guy over 10000 downloads, you see the impact of your support as well.

[Paul M]

btw, some stats i'd like to see: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=230716

.. people always requested this... a lot of coders are used to let their old versions on the site here because they want the count of downloads... aside of the number of installs, the total of downloads could be very useful... we already have the indication of who downloaded the latest version, so we could add that count like " latest version X downloads, Y installs "... THIS is more instructive than the simple X installs that are related to nothing...
The facility to do this has actually existed for almost three years - as part of the re-write of the install system I did in early 2007, I added a count of downloads that is not reset by uploading a new file. That count is not actually displayed anywhere.

Ive looked at the count tonight and strangely enough, its obviously been abused (or something has gone wacky) in a number of threads - for instance I found a couple of mods that had a count that had hit the maximum of 65,535. In fact Ive increased the field size because of this, even though I dont for one second believe that the mods involved should really have a count anything like that size. Still, I might look at adding it to the display.

[vbenhancer]

people think that the number of download help their Coder rank to raise, or something... i've seen some guys coming on my site telling me "hey, hire me, i'm a popular coder, check at vb.org, my hacks are downloads thousands of times"... but as i'm not a client, i check the hacks and they usually are crap... but clients does not know that... they think that if a coder have a high rank of downloads and installs it mean something... though we see scammers.

anyway, the question is answered... i knew there was something under the hood Paul M, but as we do not see it, we ask, hey... ;)

[Carnage]

Merhaps make it unique downloads.


This has been a personal desire of mine for years, but its always been blocked by the argument that if you know who has installed a mod, and then the mod has an exploit, you basically have a list of exploitable forums.


I already know some of the people who've installed my mods as when they post in the thread it says installed. A lot of these people have links to their forums in their sigs. That makes it really easy for me as a developer to go exploit their forums. . . A list which is /only/ viewable by the (co)developer(s) (and maybe by mods/admins) doesn't really provide any better opportunities that there are currently.

A developer who purposefully releases mods with security exploits isn't going to last very long on here. (At least i'd hope not) As a last defence, allow for users to make their mod installs anonymous, so that the list would show say 20 named users and then 4 anonymous ones at the bottom.