Just recently, Joseph Wright blogged about One year of TeX.SX, with the evident display of Yearling badges that subsequently followed on the TeX.SX side bar. As a fairly new user to TeX.SX, I've also pursued to be an active member of the community. I was amazed at the number of questions that have been asked, the amount of answers that flow in (even on older questions) it is amazing to see the amount of new users joining the community in order to learn from the experts. Heck, there's even recent talk about a TeX.SX T-shirt campaign! All this activity through posts, answers and reputation made me think that there was some form of usage statistic available to browse. Not that I've found...
Since the initiation of the site beta, there has been interest in its progression via statistics, like the number of
- questions asked;
- answers posted;
- questions answered;
- visits/day; etc.
However, the interest in this seemed to have aged with the anticipation of emerging from beta to the current site. These usage statistics would be helpful to new users, or even just for the sake of comparing it to other forums as a form of promotion. As a reference, the Usenet forum comp.text.tex provide users with some form of usage statistic - in the form of posts-per-month* - on its about page:
Although some statistics are already available (like the total number of questions asked, or counting the number of a specific badges awarded, tag counts, the number of unanswered questions and even weekly/monthly/quarterly reputation leagues, to name just a handful) there is nothing available, on demand, to the extent posted during the beta phase as far as I know..
Perhaps a first question would be whether users of TeX.SX would find such usage statistics interesting, or even helpful? If this question is answered in the affirmative, the second question would be whether it is possible to add such a feature to TeX.SX?
* Since the site access is public/Usenet and therefore unmoderated, these totals may include spam.
