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Determining active users
Jul. 25th, 2009 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janinedogSo I decided to give bug 211 a shot (allowing people to give a paid account to a random active free user). I figured it'd be good to get going on this, what with search being a paid-only feature. :)
I posted a comment in the bug about this, but I figured I'd post here too. The spec says the following for determining who is an active user:
I noted in the bug that I could see getting some sort of approximate answer for who posts entries in their own journal or who posts comments most often by doing some calculations to get the average number of entries or comments the user has made per day; i.e. ( number of entries posted / number of days the user has had their account ), or ( number of comments posted / number of days the user has had their account ). And then you could also determine who has posted in their journal most recently as well, or at least in the past X number of days. However, I don't think we have any data for who posts to communities regularly, nor do we have data for who has most recently commented (or who has commented in the past X number of days). Pretty much all of this could be retrieved through (probably complicated) queries, but obviously we don't want to do anything so complicated that it overwhelms the databases. Though maybe with enough caching it'd be okay, I'm not sure. I suppose the people who are most active probably will continue to be the people who are most active for a while.
For reference, the random user feature that we have (http://www.dreamwidth.org/random) does check to make it returns only someone who has posted in the last 7 days. But I think that's all it really does in terms of determining activity.
Anyway, does anyone have any ideas for how to go about this in a sane manner? This is a "should have" instead of a "must have", so I imagine it doesn't have to be complete/perfect, but it'd be good to get something that's at least somewhat accurate.
I posted a comment in the bug about this, but I figured I'd post here too. The spec says the following for determining who is an active user:
* Privilege people who have been long-term active on Dreamwidth for the random choice selection, not simply people who've made one or two posts recently. (Active = any one or more of: posts regularly, comments regularly, posts to comms regularly, etc.) The idea is to identify the most-active free-user contributors.
I noted in the bug that I could see getting some sort of approximate answer for who posts entries in their own journal or who posts comments most often by doing some calculations to get the average number of entries or comments the user has made per day; i.e. ( number of entries posted / number of days the user has had their account ), or ( number of comments posted / number of days the user has had their account ). And then you could also determine who has posted in their journal most recently as well, or at least in the past X number of days. However, I don't think we have any data for who posts to communities regularly, nor do we have data for who has most recently commented (or who has commented in the past X number of days). Pretty much all of this could be retrieved through (probably complicated) queries, but obviously we don't want to do anything so complicated that it overwhelms the databases. Though maybe with enough caching it'd be okay, I'm not sure. I suppose the people who are most active probably will continue to be the people who are most active for a while.
For reference, the random user feature that we have (http://www.dreamwidth.org/random) does check to make it returns only someone who has posted in the last 7 days. But I think that's all it really does in terms of determining activity.
Anyway, does anyone have any ideas for how to go about this in a sane manner? This is a "should have" instead of a "must have", so I imagine it doesn't have to be complete/perfect, but it'd be good to get something that's at least somewhat accurate.