New updates and 10,000 members challenge

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Dear all,

I am very happy to announce that we’ve just updated Wolfram Community with numerous new features and improvements. For the details see just published Wolfram Blog:

Wolfram Community Is Turning 10,000

Please note that there is a challenge there for newly joining members who will help us to reach 10,000 members. So please encourage your colleagues and friends to join, they might like the prizes! If you have any thoughts or questions related to the new updates please comment here on my post. As a teaser to the blog article here is an image featured there, - a network depicting many 1000s of members and conversations on Wolfram Community.

Many thanks to all of you for your participation and making this forum our home.

Best wishes,
Vitaliy

CommunityGraphPlot.jpg
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Congratulations! And I welcome the new updates! Very nice!
I replied also to the post on the blog, but somehow anonymous (it showed my facebook photo?) well, doesn’t matter…

Where is the live-updating graph in the above post that reflects the stats? :wink: Would that be possible to have a scheduled wolfram cloud produce a PNG and save it somewhere with a fixed filename (or upload?), and link this (changing) png in the forum?

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I actually had a similar idea of say monthly graph postings. But Wolfram Cloud automation seems very neat! We have a whole bunch of stats related updates planned and we put your thought on the agenda. Thanks for the comments, Sander.

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I’d would love to play around with the data, but it is probably huge! PDF (probability density functions) of numbers of replies per users, number of starting discussion, number of votes gotten/given… Connectivity of members (by replies). But also temporal dynamics as you showed in the blog posts could be nice to see. Especially with the new functionality DateHistogram[ dates, "Minute",DateReduction->"Day"] to see the daily dynamics of the website (or week). Do people give more likes in the(ir) morning, or rather in the(ir) evening…

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Another great idea, @Sander Huisman. We will have to think with our team which data is appropriate to publish. We might introduce different access levels for the members with various reputations. That’s a bit in future though.

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@Vitaliy Kaurov

Feature request 1: notification emails like: “Someone has commented on a discussion you’re following on Wolfram Community” are all the same, so (at least in Gmail) they all go to a single email thread in my box. Adding the specific topic as the subject:

Wolfram Community - Discussion comment - [subject of the discussion]

would be very nice.

Feature request 2: The ability to ‘close’ a discussion (and ‘bury’ them) might be a good idea; sometimes you see discussions open up again; by someone asking a new question in an old thread. Once a good answer is given, the person who started the discussion (or an Admin) should be able to close it. Or after 3 months of no new replies… There are different strategies that could be followed… This is especially useful for discussion about bugs: once they are solved in a new version the discussion could be closed with a final reply: “solved in Mathematica version X”. And will also be useful in the very very easy questions that are often asked.

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All good points. I think weak questions (no one benefits from, typos, etc.) that got resolution should be simply deleted to not pollute the site, search, filtering of good content. But all in all Community team did a good job, I wish @Vitaliy Kaurov will keep pushing this forward.

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Also, @Vitaliy Kaurov I think for the future a meaningful reputations system is in order plus some more consistent user stats in profiles and on posts.

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@Sander Huisman, @Sam Carrettie — all this ideas are already on our roadmap. Please do keep letting us know your suggestions.

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They did a great job! I’m not sure deletion is a good idea, it could simply be ignored by the search engine. That way, links to the topic still work and people who replied still have their (future) reputation.

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@Vitaliy Kaurov Tomorrow is the big day I think…!

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@Sander Huisman I think so too, nice! How did you get the data?

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I’ve started telling people to sign up tomorrow, not today.

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Hi Vitaliy,

I do not know how Sander is doing this, but this could keep you updated:

membersold = 0; RunScheduledTask[
 membersnew = 
  ToExpression[
   StringDelete[
    StringTake[
     StringSplit[
       Import["http://community.wolfram.com/people", "Text"], 
       "People on Community"][[1]], {-47, -42}], " "]]; 
 If[membersnew != membersold, 
  SendMail["From" -> "XXXXXXXX@yahoo.com", 
   "To" -> "XXXXXXXX@abdn.ac.uk", 
   "Subject" -> "A new member has joined.", 
   "Body" -> 
    "Now there are " <> ToString[membersnew] <> 
     " members in the Community.", "Server" -> "smtp.mail.yahoo.com", 
   "UserName" -> "XXXXXXXl@yahoo.com", "Password" -> "XXXXXXXX", 
   "EncryptionProtocol" -> "SSL"]]; membersold = membersnew, 10]

where the XXXXX have to be replaced by the appropriate strings.

Cheers,

Marco

PS: I haven’t really been running this for long. So there might be bugs.

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@Vitaliy Kaurov I just queried the database… just kidding! Simple scraping from the website:

The core of my code is:

data = Import["http://community.wolfram.com/people", "XMLObject"];
data = ToExpression[FirstCase[data, XMLElement["div", {"class" -> "abstract-count"}, {a_}] :> StringTrim[a], "", \[Infinity]]]

Schedule it, and update the plot with the fits automagically…

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Dear All,

regarding possible new features, I would enjoy a feature where I could follow certain people - either be alerted of everything they post, or every time they start a new thread. Some people always post really interesting things, and this feature would help me to make sure that I do not overlook anything.

Cheers,

Marco

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I second that! But maybe not by email, rather some notification at the top of the page. Like facebook does; a notification-panel. Or a special dynamic group.

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@Marco Thiel we are already working on this. @Sander Huisman that would be neat indeed but many of our users asked for email exactly. I think maybe because some people do not come to the site often and their email is a single agglomerating place for all around notifications besides Community even. Implementing both would be nice but it would not be a simple development and it would take some time.

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I am trying to get two people to sign up right now. They’ve got a good chance.

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Well, 10009 now!

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