CUNY Academic Commons

I can run a script pretty easily that will count subscribed members in a given group (or in all groups). But this would be for one-time use, and it counts subscribed users, rather than the notifications themselves.

There are a lot of things you could count within a given period, and I'm not sure how many of them would actually be useful:
- number of unique activity items that are sent out in notification emails (each email could contain many activity items, but many will be duplicates)
- total number of activity items sent out in notification emails (digests plus immediate notifications)
- number of notification emails sent (where digests count as one)
- number of group subscriptions (where Matt/CAT, Matt/CUNYPie, Boone/CUNYPie etc each count as one)
- number of users subscribed get any email notifications
- probably more, this is off the top of my head

Then there are questions about time periods over which such a number would have to be measured, since most of the counts only make sense longitudinally.

To be honest, I don't think that any of these numbers are all that meaningful, though certainly some are more meaningless than others. Brian may have some more intuitions about what's interesting and what's not.

BTW if all we're looking for is a sheer email count, André can probably provide way more easily than I can, by checking the outgoing email logs. But that will count things like activation emails, password resets, friendship and group invitations, etc.

Well, what I'm generally looking for is a non-intrusive way to take stock of email usage of the site. Maybe, in the end, it's better not to track email notifications themselves, but rather various elements of group usage -- number of forum replies posted, files uploaded, docs created, etc. Presumably, every email created (even, eventually, forum posts by email) is related to an on-site event, so maybe we could just track those events. It would be interesting to have that info to figure out the usage/uptake of various elements of the site. How many groups have Docs enabled? how many are using them? What is the average number of files/docs per group? I think that it would be interesting to track such numbers.

The simplest count of what's happening on the site is the Activity count - nearly everything that happens has an associated activity item. It's pretty easy for me to count activity items between given dates.

Nearly anything else can also be counted, but it will take more custom work. So, I'd invite those who are interested to compile a list of specific items they'd like to have counted. If there are items on that list that are prohibitively difficult to do, or that would produce information of little value, I can jump in and say so.

Matt Gold wrote:

Well, what I'm generally looking for is a non-intrusive way to take stock of email usage of the site. [...] I think that it would be interesting to track such numbers.

You know what's cool? If we write up a script to poll for these stats, then I can create a historical data graph with these using Munin [http://munin-monitoring.org/] , so you'll be able to detect trends, correlate to certain occurrences (e.g. version releases).

Can we have a brief conference call to discuss this idea? I'm really intrigued by it.

Very happy to discuss but can't do so until next week because of some impending deadlines. If others want to talk in my absence, feel free.

Boone, given how soon we're going to have reply-by-email in place, I think we should keep this on the road map and start to plan to create something to track total numbers of site emails. It would be especially interesting to be able to track such information before and after the implementation of the reply-by-email system to see how it is affecting site traffic.