si-community 2012 year in review

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One last look back at 2012. This time for si-community.

Here’s a forum bubble chart that gives an at-a-glance overview (of the top 5 forums based on number of views). The size of the bubble indicates the number of views; the X-axis is the number of topics created in 2012, and the Y-axis is the number of replies.
si-community-bubble-chart

Most viewed topics overall

  1. mesh paint (21919)
  2. SI 2013 sightings (17507)
  3. PhysX Fluid Simulation in Softimage ICE (15696)
  4. SPOILER ALERT – general Softimage 2013 description (11960)
  5. Looks like Autodesk bought Naiad (10198)
  6. bring back softimage.net (9574)
  7. Vray for Softimage official release (9544)
  8. quickPrimitive (9427)
  9. SI Technology Previews (8452)
  10. any news about Softimage 2014 ??? (7950)
  11. exit Stephen Blair? (7872)

Most viewed News topics

  1. SI 2013 sightings (17507)
  2. SPOILER ALERT – general Softimage 2013 description (11960)
  3. Vray for Softimage official release (9544)
  4. SI Technology Previews (8452)
  5. exit Stephen Blair? (7872)
  6. No 2013 Advantage Pack (7774)
  7. Modo 601 Preview (5837)
  8. Luxology & the Foundry merge (3442)
  9. “Thiago’s Teamup and Mr. Jones” (2781)
  10. Maya nHair – how hard to repro? (2575)

Most viewed Announcements

  1. Motion Tools 1.0 (7682)
  2. SOFTIMAGE|UeberTage 2012 Frida September 28th 2012 (7049)
  3. new release: emPolygonizer4 version 4.0 (4780)
  4. ZBrush FiberMesh to strands compound (4687)
  5. ImplosiaFX 1.0 is available! (3200)
  6. Exocortex Species 1.0 now available!! (3156)
  7. xsibase “may harm your computer” [???] (2643)
  8. Fabric Engine v1.0 released (2493)
  9. Animation tools (2477)
  10. Essential Geo for Softimage (2136)

Most viewed Open Discussion topics

  1. Looks like Autodesk bought Naiad (10198)
  2. bring back softimage.net (9574)
  3. any news about Softimage 2014 ??? (7950)
  4. WTF??? Autodesk snubs Softimage in GDC schedule! (6314)
  5. the future? (was: the “frustration” thread) (5267)
  6. Windows 8 (3904)
  7. XSI Base down? (3629)
  8. Great work done with Softimage (3301)
  9. 2014 WISH LIST (3161)
  10. How rendering should be (3123)

Most active discussions (topics with the most replies)

  1. SI 2013 sightings (313)
  2. SPOILER ALERT – general Softimage 2013 description (281)
  3. WTF??? Autodesk snubs Softimage in GDC schedule! (145)
  4. SI Technology Previews (145)
  5. Looks like Autodesk bought Naiad (138)
  6. No 2013 Advantage Pack (133)
  7. bring back softimage.net (117)
  8. quickPrimitive (111)
  9. PhysX Fluid Simulation in Softimage ICE (111)
  10. Vray for Softimage official release (102)

Forums with the most topics

  1. ICE (211)
  2. OpenDiscussion (108)
  3. General Troubleshooting (89)
  4. Rendering (87)
  5. News (82)
  6. Programming (65)
  7. Announcements (65)
  8. Animation (61)
  9. Modeling (42)
  10. Materials & Shaders (37)

Forums with the most views

  1. News (147989)
  2. OpenDiscussion (121071)
  3. ICE (107861)
  4. Announcements (83549)
  5. Plugins (52735)
  6. Rendering (48569)
  7. ICE compounds (44523)
  8. General Troubleshooting (33671)
  9. Animation (27112)
  10. Programming (24807)

This data was obtained by visiting all the forum pages (such as all 9 pages of the News forum) and extracting the number of posts, posting date, number of replies, and topic title from the html.

4 thoughts on “si-community 2012 year in review”

  1. Thanks, puts my own statistics post to shame,
    but then again you’re a professional at gathering stats… šŸ˜‰
    How do you extract this data from the html?
    Any helpful software or are you doing this manually?

    Reply ↓

    • Hi

      I wrote a python script to do it.
      I used urllib to get the page:

      # Get a file-like object for the Python Web site's home page.
#f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.si-community.com/community/viewforum.php?f=5")

      Then I just readlines and used regex to extract the data.

      I tried the htmlparser module, but it exits immediately when it hits malformed html (and there is a malformed img tag at the top of each page, probably on purpose to block scrapers?). Then I looked into things like BeautifulSoup, but I was in a hurry so I just did it the brute force way with regex.

      Reply ↓

  2. PS – One thing that’s unclear to me: The numbers you mention under the header “Forums with the most posts” are they meant to signify posts or topics?

    Reply ↓

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