How does AMO calulate theme users?

Discuss application theming and theme development.
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LoudNoise
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How does AMO calulate theme users?

Post by LoudNoise »

I was poking around the "Full Themes" section of AMO thinking about causing some rational bugzilla trouble because of this post: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2640725 . With the exception of the Yahoo persona (which appears to be gray and puts the "Yahoo" logo more or less in the search box without actually changing the default search engine) the first five themes had considerably more users then two thru five of the persona best of.

Anyway, Macdavis lead the pack with 510,558 users. When I went back 20 minutes later to check my figures NASA Night Launch was at 465,731. Apparently 44,827 folks went running out the NNL door in those twenty minutes. None of the popular personas lost a soul.

Since Macdavis didn't update his theme in these twenty minutes (I checked. The shuttle had not be replaced with an evil clown holding a chain saw) this seemed ludicrous. 9% seems to be a pretty heavy blow for twenty minutes.
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WaltS48
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Re: How does AMO calulate theme users?

Post by WaltS48 »

You might want to ask that question on the Mozilla Add-ons Forum.

I'm just happy they combined Personas and Themes into Themes like they announced they were going to do almost a year ago, to avoid confusion with PersonaID. =D>

:idea: If you don't have, or want to create an account there. I could ask for you.
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lithopsian
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Re: How does AMO calulate theme users?

Post by lithopsian »

Themes may be different to addons although I can't see why. Addons ping AMO every 24 hours, obviously subject to the application running and network being available. AMO counts the pings. They vary with a regular weekly rhythm, often generally increasing over time. Disabled themes are included in the counts, so they're really counting installations, not users.
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mcdavis
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Re: How does AMO calulate theme users?

Post by mcdavis »

@LoudNoise, I saw the same drop you did. It's recovered now a good bit. I attribute a lot of the drop to the holidays in the U.S. and other western countries, with people doing things other than browsing from desktop Firefox. (And BTW, thanks for the extra links.)
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LoudNoise
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Re: How does AMO calulate theme users?

Post by LoudNoise »

You're welcome although it does not seem to be a great deal of help :)

I was simply surprised by the a 9% drop in twenty minutes.
Last edited by LoudNoise on January 14th, 2013, 9:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: How does AMO calulate theme users?

Post by mcdavis »

LoudNoise wrote:You're welcome although it does not seem to be a great deal of help :)


Yeah, $0 and $0. Hehe. I'm laughing at that, it's actually pretty funny to see that. Actually, though, there has been an uptick in contributions in the Indiegogo time frame in general. One of those was kind of large -- that's very good :) -- so it obviously came from someone who cares, which might make it a member of this community, although I didn't recognize the name. It's enough to get OS X 10.6 (although not quite enough for that and 10.7, so I'm still fund-raising, and 10.8 will require a hardware upgrade, but I'll fight my way across that burning bridge when I get to it).

People are donating directly to PayPal, instead of Indiegogo, which is actually better for the project because I don't have to pay the Indiegogo cut (although I don't begrudge it, they are providing a service) and also because it gets to me in a couple days instead of waiting for the Indiegogo fundraiser to end plus ten or fifteen business days, so it's way better when it comes direct.

I didn't expect Indiegogo to garner contributions from random strangers, I mostly just thought it might help people who were on the fence about donating to see it as legit. I also thought people might like to see a progress report, to see where their donations are going, and that there might be a completion effect where getting closer to the goal might encourage donations. Also, I've had people ask in the past if they could use something other than PayPal because that didn't work for them, and I was hoping for a crowdsourcing service to support that, but drew a blank there.

I was simply surprised by the a 9% drop in twenty minutes.


Yeah, that is surprising. I've seen worse, but not often, and it usually had to do with some problem in AMO's server cluster.
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