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We all know that Liferay is a great social content and collaboration platform, which is why we at Liferay use it to implement our liferay.com website.  There are tons of interesting potential statistics to glean from this, to introspect into our community a bit more than the standard "50,000 registered users, 170,000 forum posts" kinds of stats that often find their way into slide decks at conferences.  I'd like to start a series of posts for interesting information about our community, that goes a bit deeper than typical stats.  Also, I welcome ideas for other stats, and I encourage everyone to use the community tools to their fullest extent.  For example, marking forum posts as questions when appropriate, and circling back to mark answers, and perhaps adding tags as appropriate.  

As part of a recent podcast which you'll be seeing/hearing in the near future, I wanted to generate some statistics on our activity level.  We often claim number like the above, but are they really indicative of the quality and usefulness of our community?  I think diving a bit deeper is useful, so here is the first in a series of stats I'll be looking at.  We are also planning a larger-scale survey (thanks to the awesome input from some of our valued community members in this thread), so look for that soon.

Registered User by Geography

First, a quick survey of registered liferay.com users by geography:

Ok, that's interesting, but what about by region?

This is not surprising to me - I've seen a lot of activity from our friends where Liferay enjoys a lot of mindshare.  

Recent Activity

Now, these first two charts are "all time" - that is, since the beginning of time (around 2002).  I thought it might be interesting to look at the numbers from more recent history, looking at the 5 year, 2 year, 1 year, 6 month, 2 month, and 1 month time periods.  I guess not surprisingly I didn't see much variation in the above.  When you get down to the last 2 months, the US starts to ramp up, perhaps we need to take more summer breaks or something.

Active, Unique Logins

Lastly, I often qualify the "50,000 registered users" stat with "well, of course, not all of them are active" and I usually guesstimate that 10% are active.  A basic measure of activity is when a user logs in.  You can use liferay.com anonymously all you wish, but to contribute, you generally have to log in.  So let's look at the lastLoginDate field for our user database and graph it out for unique users.

I was pleasently surprised to see that over 10,000 unique users have actually logged in at least once since February alone (of course many of these were 1-timers but still).

Finally, I found this graph rather amusing given my recent bad luck with IE (courtesy of "William" and GraphJam):

Have an idea of the kinds of stats you may be interested in?  Leave comments here or in the thread mentioned above and what we can dig up.