Extra Statistics
 

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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 :)

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.

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.

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).

Nonsense of course, but feel free to believe what you will.

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.

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.