BuddyPress

What would be helpful for me would to be able to see a statistical breakdown and graphical representation of the following:

-forum topics/group activity
–who is active
–who isn’t active
–amount of replies
–popular replies

-member tracking/analytics
–who has visited what, when, and for how long

I could probably think of more analytics that would be of assistance to me, but I think you can get the gist. To put this in context, I create learning communities and need to track progress not so much for formal assessment at this point, but to track user progress to see if they’re lost or inactive and to follow up based on those analytics.

For more information see SNAPP: http://research.uow.edu.au/learningnetworks/seeing/snapp/index.html

Is this possible in BP’s current iteration? Statistically? Graphically?

Additionally, does anyone have any experience expertly tailoring Google Analytics to map certain activities?

Hmm… I don’t know abut your second question regarding Google Analytics, but these 2 plugins are along the the lines of your first request. You’ll need to do some tweaking with them but the general gist is there:

http://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-community-stats/

http://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-member-profile-stats/

@paulhastings0 this is definitely a start towards greater analytics, but the grand idea is to map connections or lack of connections and to pinpoint social activity.

I’ll put these plugins in my arsenal. Thanks!

Also, take a look at things like Social Collider for a user interaction mapping: http://socialcollider.net/

Oh, I just came across this tonight: http://heavyanalytics.com/

Perhaps you could drop the developer a line and drop in some feature requests since he seems to still be coding it.

Will do, @paulhastings0. Great stuff!

Let me know how this sort of thing works out.

Will do, @djpaul. This was one of the factors for contacting you about potential work in the future. It’s a huge research interest of mine and something I’d love to be able to do at the moment in BuddyPress as a way to further prove its worth as a LMS.

Yes, I would like to see this kind of feature too please? Just been fruitlessly searching around the web for visualisation tools for my users. Such things seem to exist for Twitter as pointed out but not Buddypress. There are also tools like Graphviz and its associated plugin for Wordpress but they are not dynamic and look obtuse! I imagine a front end where avatars are linked by ‘edges’ in a graph (in the mathematical sense) with the colour or width of an edge depicting the strength of user’s ‘friendliness’, i.e. based on a tally of mentions for instance? Taking it a step further by clicking on the avatar one produces a further graph showing their contributions around Buddypress (though this is less important). Thanks for the discussion. I thought I was on my own here!