A few weeks ago in the CB, someone made a comment about their height in the listing of Other Users in the chatterbox. It gave me the idea of keeping statistics on such things. My original goal was simply to have a mechanism to keep track of my relative height in Other Users. But since I had to fetch and store all that Other Users information, I realized I could keep track of a few other things as well. Most notably, how much time everyone has spent logged into PM over the last week. Scary, I know!

So without further ado, I present Perlmonks addicts statistics. I hope it's a nice complement to mojotoad's CB stats. It will eventually keep track of a 7-day window of data, but the buffer currently has only ~2 days in it. If there is great interest, I could post the code, but it's something quick-n-dirty I just threw together this weekend -- I'd have to clean it up first.

Some technical notes: The scraper fetches the Other Users XML ticker every 3 minutes (to my knowledge, this is the window of time for which you will appear in Other Users), and if you are seen at that time, you are credited with 3 minutes of time on Perlmonks. Obviously it doesn't see cloaked users or compensate for those of you who never turn off your chatterbox client. And right now, it processes the entire dataset for each page request. So if the site gets hammered, I'll have to institute some sort of caching (like the CB stats).

Please send me a message if you'd like to be excluded from these stats (alternatively, cloak yourself).

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