Activity graph
 

Would it be possible to make something where you can view a graph of the activity of a certain person over the past month? And maybe a graph of the average activity of active members as well.

It could be done and I had considered it, however, activity is very expensive to calculate in bulk, as you will realize if you are the first to load http://zelaron.com/forum/zelstat.php?num=100 at midnight GMT. (Results are cached for future page loads, so you have to be the first to get the long load time). Keep in mind that while the server is calculating all those activity figures, other page loads are stalled. Of course, that page actually calculates the activity of every user that has visited in the past 28 days... in any case, I have no GD experience, so you'd need to enlist Chruser's help on this.

Couldn't something like this be done.

Grab the activity of the first 100 users. Starting from highest to lowest. divide the total by 100 and you will have your avage activity. For example: Lets do 10 users.

User1 = 100%
User2 = 98%
User3 = 94%
User4 = 90%
User5 = 85%
User6 = 82%
User7 = 82%
User8 = 76%
User9 = 71%
User10 = 69%

Total = 847 / 10 = 84.7% would be your avarage. Then do something like <background ="act_graph.gif" width="84%">

Cant something like that be done?

Well I think it's a fairly good idea, it would be cool to be able to see how active someone has been over a period of time and see how active the forum has been over a period of time.

Holy shit . . .I've fallen to #25.

He wants a graph of the past month. That many datapoints would look best as a line graph instead a mangled mess of tables.

15 here :(. I was #2 not all that long ago.

And then you kinda didn't visit for a while.

Some of the activity graphs will be exceptionally boring. Mine for instance will go up for a few days and then level out at 100...those type of graphs are exceptionally boring...:p

I'm not looking for it to be fun and exciting, it's supposed to be informative.

But wouldn't it be more interesting if it had unexpected peaks and well-earned troughs?? All in a little pinky colour...

I see what you mean, but like Limewire said, you could just calculate the average for the top 100 users and have it plotted onto a graph. I doubt it would be even half as hard on the server as it is for it to calculate the activity of every member every day. As for a graph for the activity of a member over the past x days, the activity is already getting calculated so it would simply be a matter of it being plotted on a graph.

The server does not automatically calculate the activity of every user every day. In order to average the top 100, it would have to calculate the activity of every user, so you might as well average all of them, no? Activity for past days is not stored, so yes it is more complicated than you think to graph it. I encourage you to go to get a hold of a copy of my activity hack off of vb.org and look over it to clear up your misconceptions.

If you're talking to me, I'd understand greek better than your activity hack, I'm just throwing the idea out there.

Wouldn't you beable to use the raw data in the user table?

The "raw" data in the user table is just the activity before it is divided by the max possible, and the data in the user table is only valid for users whose posts have been viewed today, which is why I have to calculate the activity of the entire board at the same time for the stat hack.

Doing back-activity for a single user for a limited period isn't that bad, the main problem there is that I know absolutely nothing about using GD to output a reasonable-looking graph.