Visualizing the logos.com discussion forums
Marshall Brown
Post information collected from the logos.com discussion forums scraped from the web on 6/8/2018 is displayed visually to help get a sense of forum size, activity, sentiment and user participation.
How many forums, threads, posts?
- 48 main forums
- 103,868 total threads
- 798,558 total posts
Which forums are most popular?
Below we rank the forums by total number of threads.
Which forums generate the most discussion?
Forums are ranked below by average number of replies per thread as an indicator of the discussions generated in each forum. The darker bars represent forums with more post replies.
Posting trends over time
The chart below shows the distribution of posts in each forum over time.
Temporal patterns
Temporal posting patterns are described by showing number of posts for each year, day of week, or time of Day
Questions about users
How many users?
- 21,231 unique user names.
How many times do users post?
Most users post once, a handful post 6 or more times, and a small proportion of users post a lot.
- 50% of users (10,615) have 1 posts
- 25% of users (5,307) have 6 or more posts
- 10% of users (2,123) have 22 or more posts
- 1% of users (212) have 542 or more posts
Top 10 rankings of users by number of postings
Comment sentiment over time
A simple ‘sentiment’ analysis was conducted for three of the most popular forums for all posts after Jan 1, 2017. This type of analysis attempts to gauge user opinion by analyzing the words used in postings through time. Words with a positive association (as defined by a pre-specified dictionary) receive higher scores, while words with negative connotations are assigned negative scores. For example, appreciate or enjoy gets a score of +2, blessing gets a score of +3, disrespected is scored as a -2, and cheat as a -3. Scores range from -5 to +5.
Results should be taken with a grain of salt, as the sentiment rating is only as good as the dictionary used. I used the open source ‘afinn’ dictionary described here.
Sentiment scores shown below show sentiment scores averaged by week.