Build a community overview statistic report

[wilr]

See http://open.silverstripe.org/ticket/3373

A key part of managing a forum community is knowing who your top posters are, so you know who to look after. It allows you to praise and thank those who consistently post lots, it allows you to spot those who are becoming top posters, and it allows you to confirm you suspicion about those who are dropping off, so you can motivate them to return. (In a forum with moderators, it can you see if moderators are doing their job, or allows moderators to see how their community is going.)

When shown publicly, such a report can also serve to inspire people to post lots. (Suggestion: Make this a public-facing report)

A key way to do this is to: For each month, identify the top 10 posters, and then plot them on a 12 month graph. SEE SCREENSHOT.

(Note: This is NOT the same as finding the top ten posters of all time, and plotting them over a year. That approach will omit some people, such as those who have dramatically risen or dropped in post frequency. The correct approach, doing it month by month, will end up showing a few more than 10 users overall, but generally, not that many more, e.g. 20)

Plee: When going to implement this, please get to a start point with real data and show me how the graph begins to show. With real data I shall be able to make suggestions on how to improve the graph. The data I used in making the example WAS MADE UP so it might do with some improvements.

The screenshots shows (a) bolding the top poster for a month and (b) allowing you to look at year long snapshots.

Long term, as shown in the screenshot, this might be useful to other community data, like forum threads, showcase sites (in the case of silverstripe.org), SVN commits, etc.

[camfindlay]

Would be interested in getting something like this going. Any idea of other interesting metrics we could look at?