EPiServerWorld statistics wishlist

Around the summer of 2010, EPiServer World passed 10,000 registered members (interview with no. 10,000 here). In October 2010, the 11,000 mark was also passed. Congratulations to EPiServer, and a big thumbs up to the entire community which provides a quite impressive level of documentation, support and innovation.

Overview:

• Request for statistics
• Community Recognition Program (EPiServer World points)
• Wishlist
• What else?

Request for statistics

There was recently a discussion on Twitter started by Joel Abrahamsson requesting that EPiServer release some info on the number of active users. Several other Twitter users followed up and requested more info.

EPiServer promptly responded with the following statistics:

• 67,3 % of visitors in September were active and accessed EPiServer World more than once (tweet)
• 501 certified devs is the current number, YOY growth around 25 % (tweet)

Community Recognition Program (EPiServer World points)

As you are probably aware of, EPiServer introduced the Community Recognition Program on EPiServerWorld a while back. Each registered member is awarded points based on their contributions to EPiServerWorld, whether it be blog posts, comments, articles submitted or passing the ECD exam.

Until now, most users have been lurking in the Citizen / Participating Citizen / Contributing Citizen bracket, but a big congratulations to Magnus Paulsson who became the very first member to be upgraded to Esteemed Citizen level.

Quite an impressive fact, given that not even any EPiServer employees are at this level (although they are probably very busy writing awesome code for the next EPiServer version ;-) )

Now to the point of this blog post. It would be very interesting if more stats were available about the member base. This could both be used for fun statistics and a useful overview of the demographic of EPiServerWorld.

Wishlist

EPiServer might be working on this already without us knowing about it, but here is my wishlist (no particular order):

• Show a member's actual points along with the level. We all know that developers are competitive by nature, and the level system on EPiServerWorld dangerously resembles the level system of an RPG (come on, be honest - geeks love RPGs. Fact.) Showing the actual points might actually trigger even more activity in the forums, blogs etc.
  Making the points available on a member profile for everyone to see would certainly add to the competitiveness, but I guess it is also an alternative to only show the points to the member when logged in (e.g. My Settings page).
• Show statistics on the home country of members. Would be interesting to see where all these 11,000 devs come from.
• Show number of certified devs, as mentioned earlier.
• Show number of total members, and active members, as mentioned earlier.
• Show average years of experience with EPiServer, perhaps even sorted by EPW level

UPDATE (from comments):

• Ranking submissions by quality, not quantity. E.g. thumbs up/down voting system, or based on number of views.
• More EPW levels (currently Oracle 3000+ is highest)
• Points awarded for becoming an EMVP. Or the other way around - getting nominated for EMVP when reaching a certain level
• Points awarded for recruiting new EPW members - referral code entered when registering new user
• Differentiating points awarded for passing the ECD - e.g. "my first ECD ever on any version (500pts)", "my first ECD on a new version (400pts)", "renewed ECD on any version (250pts)" etc.
• Adding a Twitter account to the member profile so that notifications can be pushed between Twitter and EPW. I see there is already some kind of automatic update tweeting in place, see @episerverworld's tweet when a blog was commented recently, but I don't see where they link up the Twitter account to the EPW account.
• Sorting forums threads into open/closed
• More focus on the "mark as answer" feature - send reminder to the original poster if thread has >1 replies and has been inactive for X days. The more threads are marked as "solved", the easier it will be to find what you're looking for.
• Enabling the thread starter to mark the thread as "answered" even if he is the only one who has commented (of course without points being awarded). Sometimes, the original poster finds the solution himself.

A few topics for discussion about the points/level system:

• Are the points awarded for each activity balanced enough? A blog post can be very comprehensive and become a valuable resource for many other devs, but is only rewarded 5 pts, whereas an article or a forum post marked as answer is rewarded 10 pts.
• Is an ECD renewal rewarded as much points as a first-time ECD (500pts)? Should it be?
• What happens when Magnus Paulsson exceeds the Oracle level (3000 pts)? ;-)

What else?

There are probably lots more that the level system and member statistics can be used for. What are your suggestions?