Hi! In my job, I get to to travel the world and talk to a lot of SourceForge.net users. One question always keeps popping up: what, exactly, does the “activity percentile” actually mean? Or, more to the point: why is my activity percentile lower than another project that has usage patterns that seem to exactly match mine? Read on to learn more about the tool that can help you answer these questions!
People are often surprised to learn that our formula for calculating a project’s activity percentile is public, and can be found in our Site Docs. Essentially, it’s a combination of three different classes of activity: traffic, development, and communication.
The traffic class contains the number of hits to the project’s pages on SourceForge.net, the number of logo hits, and the number of downloads. The development class is comprised of the number of CVS or SVN commits, the number of days since the last file release, and the number of days since the most recent project admin login. Communication currently contains the number of new Tracker submissions and the number of forum posts.
These three sets of numbers get compared to those of other projects, and eventually become the relative activity percentile.
Now comes the really good part. You can see the formula in action on a project’s Rank History page, which contains the values of each of these numbers for a particular day in the recent past. It’s a bit hidden, for the next few weeks or so, but you can still get to it through the Software Map – just click on the number that shows up in the Rank column for your project. The screenshot to the right shows where that link is. To see what an example Rank History page looks like, check out the one for Gallery.
You can also click on one of the date fields shown on the Rank History page to see the formula itself with the numbers for that day’s activity plugged in! What will they think of next?
Enjoy your new stats obsession,
Ross