Trends over time
From PluginWiki
This allows you to investigate trends of your group over time. There are two parts to it:
- Downloading the relevant log files from Yahoo
- Analysing them in a spreadsheet
The data is derived from that found in Management > Group Activity : Message Posts and Management > Group Activity : Memberships.
This assumes you have some basic familiarity with Excel.
Downloading Logs
The plugin adds two new links:
If you click on one of these, you'll be asked to select a file. Give it an plugin of .csv.
The plugin will then download the log. This takes a very long time - perhaps up to a day for a large group that has been active for years. It has to be slow to avoid Yahoo blocking you, but you'll only do this very occasionally.
You can see the progress in a countdown in the taskbar:
Analysing them
- Get the blank spreadsheet from here.
- Open up each of your .csv files. You may get an error saying they were only partly loaded; if so then it has the more recent data.
- Cut and paste them into the obvious spreadsheet tabs.
- Click the Process button. This can take up to an hour to run for a large group.
You'll then get some statistics about the members and messages, and some graphs of behaviour over time. Here's a sample:
Conclusions you can draw from this:
- People celebrate Christmas.
- You can see where I ran the function to remove bouncing members.
- The number of posts within the first 30 days of joining is stable over time, which suggests that new members are continuing to find the group useful.
