Noticed a change in your number of members statistics on your homepage?

  • 15 February 2018
  • 7 replies
  • 222 views

Hi everyone,



You might have noticed a decrease in the number of members shown on your community homepage. We have made a change in the statistics widget; it only includes registered members now, and not banned users or users in the waiting for email confirmation stage.



The statistics widget on our community home pages used to show the total number of users. But for many communities there are thousands and thousands of fake accounts stuck on the 'waiting for email confirmation' or banned spammer accounts. Therefore, these community statistics could have been misleading. This was implemented based on multiple client's feedback.

7 replies

Hi Maryam,



Thank you for letting us know about this update !



Quick question tho. Our Analyst has just made an export to check the relevance of the statistics. We notice that we get two different results :


  • From homepage : 10.765 members
  • From Analytics > Export > User : 12.459 members

The second number matches with the result from homepage that we had yesterday before your update (12.451 members). That makes sense (even tho I'm suprised that we got that much banned and awaiting users) !



However, we need to have the same result from Analytics and homepage :


  • To explain this gap to our management
  • Because the number from homepage is the right one and we need to have it in our monthly automatized reporting

Are you planning to implement this update to your Analytics tool ?



Thank you ! ๐Ÿ™‚

Tiou
Hey @Tiou , for now no changes are planned for the exports provided in Analytics. What you need to do in your reporting is to filter out the following user roles:


  • roles.banned
  • roles.not-activated

This way your report will reflect the same number of users.
@Maryam Hmm. Not that convenient, but will do the job. ๐Ÿ™‚ Thanks! I'll let you know if we need more info!
Hi @Maryam & all,



Using your filters, here is our reporting of number of members (on February 2018) :


  • all (Analytics) : 12.642
  • all (homepage) : 10.935
  • banned : 126
  • not activated : 1479

As you can see, it makes a 12.49% ratio of users stuck on the 'waiting for email confirmation'.



We believe it's quite important. What do you think about that ? Is it normal ? Have you done a benchmark about that ? Do you plan to improve the sign up process ?



Thanks ! 🙂
Hi Tiou,



We are looking into solutions to prevent these accounts which are stuck on the waiting for email confirmation stage from being created. We are not big fans of CAPTCHA as it can give a bad user experience at times, so think a dynamic honeypot could be better. This would involve having a hidden profile field which normal users cannot see, but bots would, and when they fill it in it would prevent their registration (this field would constantly change in its naming and placement). So we are going to trial the dynamic honeypot and if it works we will roll it out, and if it doesn't we will test some other solutions.
@Shane1 OK, thanks ๐Ÿ™‚ Are you currently testing it ? Is it on your roadmap ?
@Tiou I expect the trial will begin in the coming weeks as its nearly at the top of our backlog ๐Ÿ™‚

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