"Jason Bleazard" <dml@bleazard.net> wrote:
> On Tue, March 4, 2008 9:15 pm, Terrible Tom said:
>>
>> I'm experiencing Geek Statistical Nirvana
> Pretty cool. I thought I'd been on this list a long time, but it turns out
> there's some guy named Jon who's been around even longer than me. Impressive.
Funny how that works. :-) Hey, I've got to be first at something!
Still, 2nd out of 4,266 isn't bad. :-) BTW, if you're sorting by
years of membership and you look at #3, you will discover a weakness
in the years of membership calculation. Its an e-mail address which
appears to have posted only 16 times, but since the first was in 1996
and the last was in 2007, they are credited with over 11 years of
membership, which *probably* isn't fair. The problem is that I
haven't really figured out a fair alternative. That is, I *could*
disregard any month (or possibly year) during which somebody hasn't
posted, but that isn't exactly fair if somebody has been around for 5
years and there is a month or two where they don't post, or they
simply aren't a heavy poster but still read everything. (For example,
I have been a continuous member of the MML for something like 8 years
now, but I don't post there a whole lot. I still get all the messages
though, I read the ones which are of interest to me, and I consider
myself a full fledged MML member.) The way the calculation works now
is if somebody posted once in 1995 and then went away for 10 years and
posted another message in 2005, they're credited with 10 years of
"membership", which really isn't true, but at this point, I'm not
exactly sure what can be done about that, or in fact, if anything
should be... (Speaking of which, I don't know if you noticed or not,
but the next time Norah posts to the DML, she's going to move past you
into the #2 spot.) ;-)
I guess I could create a second membership column, one would be
"total years of membership", which would be calculated the same as it
is now, and perhaps another could be "total years of continuous
membership" or "total years of active membership" whereby a person's
posting activity (or lack thereof) is taken into account.
I'll probably end up just leaving it the way it is, since neither
solution seems ideal, and leaving things alone creates the least
amount of work for myself. ;-)
--
-Jon-
.- Jon Steiger -- jon@dakota-truck.net or jon@jonsteiger.com -.
| '96 Kolb Firefly, '96 Suzuki Intruder, Miscellaneous Mopars |
`-------------------------------- http://www.jonsteiger.com --'
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