Member List / Statistics Page

OK

I can't tell if this has been brought up before so I am just going to throw it out there (possibly again).

Is there a way to tell, and if not, can it be added? what rank (of joining) a member is? Yes, I know that you can easily see when someone joined - but that doesn't tell me very much. This is totally a curiosity thing (and isn't that what this site is pretty much about at times?) but sometimes I wonder when I view another members profile where they are at on the list.

ALSO - on the STATS page why does it state 'you and none other'????? when it is clearly stating you and ONE other?

And as an addon to that, why don't we have the statistics of how many book we own that no one else does. I think I am more interested in howm any unique titles I have in my library....

Mendoza

You can see all the books owned by only you by clicking on the shared column in your library. It'll sort by how many people own each book, a second click will reverse the sort.

The you in 'you and none other' is as if you are talking to someone else, not the site talking to you. A seach in talk will bring up extensive discussion about this phrase.

By rank, do you mean whether a person was the first person or 100th person to join LT? I think Tim would be against that sort of elitism. Or do you mean whether they are a paid member or not. That information is given on the profile page.

I think the OP means (#libraries with at least the same number of books) by rank. The only way I know of to find this is by using the Zeitgeist 50 largest libraries (see more) link: http://www.librarything.com/z_users.php and this only works for the upper 3000. I seem to be #315 today.

Hmm, OP said rank (by join), so my guess is quite likely wrong. My only other guess is that the users just might be assigned a userid and that this might be a simple count. I seem to have a cookie called cookie_usernum with the value 236396. I don't know if this has anything to do with when I joined and I don't think I can see another users cookie_usernum.

I just checked some old blog entries. Between july and august 2007, there were between 200.000 and 250.000 members of LT, so the 236396 seems like a good guess.

>5 bnielsen:

My cookie was in the 15500 range and I've been around since November 2005, for what it's worth to get a feel for numbers/timeline.

Yes, each user is assigned a user number. This didn't start immediately when LT began and there are lingering problems from it (hey, Tim wasn't a system architect when he started the project).

I thought about including the usernum on the top section of your home page but thought that it didn't really fit the "feel" of LT to be thinking of yourself as a number or ranking yourself that way. (indeed, your usernum IS visible to me when I view your home page...makes it easier to find your usernum instead of having to look it up via the database. And yes, we can see your home page but nobody else can).

Usernums as a badge of honor is a slashdot kind of thing. It's big there. Here, not so much. And I don't think it would be that useful but when the members speak we listen (mostly) and if you decide that you'd like to see your number then we can probably swing that. It's certainly no secret. You can always find out your own number by looking at your LT cookie for cookie_usernum.

I was an architect of small systems ;)

I don't know if it's really not big here. I mean obviously not as big as it is on Slashdot. But I know when I check out someone's profile page the join date is one of the first things I look at. That said, I don't particularly want user numbers displayed, the date is enough info for me. But I am only 4140, ha!

If only you were 5150 you could rock out to Van Halen on your profile page.

Sorry for bad 80s Pop reference.

You take that back. That is not bad 80s. Don't make me shake my cane at you.

Some would argue that ALL of the 80s was bad. I have a Miami Vice t-shirt that would disagree...but I digress.

No not all was bad in the 80s, we got married in 1984 (so my husband could at least remember the year; yes, because of Orwell)

9>

I'm not sure that revealing your usernum is a good idea -- it might give people access to your library. (Mine's a couple thousand smaller than yours, hah! :) Of course, Tim is presumably usernum 1 (or 0, maybe), so this sort of geekery is pretty pointless.)

I definitely look at join date all the time -- usually to find out if someone responsible for a combination mess should have known better, or just to confirm my suspicions when someone posts a suggestion for wishlist as though it were a new idea.

No, the user number isn't like knowing someone's magical name :)

#9 I think we've established that usernum is a small integer, so I don't think keeping it secret improves my safety much as Tim also indicates in #10 :-)

Sorry to rehash a cooling thread but, I'm also curious how unique my library is. I would like some measure of the uniquness of my collection as compared with everyone else. One of my thrills is logging a book that no-one else has.

Also on the stats page, could someone please explain the median/mean book obscurity to me? If I have a figure of 9/723, does this mean that 9 out of every 723 LT'ers has a book in common with my collection?

Thanks

>17 bernsad:

The first number is the mean. So, if you sort your library by number shared, the middle book in your library is shared by 9 people (i.e., half your library is made up of books shared by 9 people or less).

The second number is the median. So, the average number of your obscurity is 723. The lower number, the more obscure--this is basically like your requested measure of "uniqueness". If you take all your books and average the number of people you share a book with, your number is 723.

Hmm, thanks for that christiguc. Is that explained somewhere in the site or how did you happen to know?

bernsad, it's on a Wiki page that isn't very conspicuous, so I'm not surprised you didn't see it. It's here.

A small correction--the first number is the median, the second is the mean.

Oops. :)

I thought it was explained right underneath the numbers themselves? Did that change?

It just says "number of users who have books in your collection" for the obscurity numbers. When coupled with the "median/mean" phrase next to the number, it's fine but wasn't immediately obvious to me either. But then it is about obscurity...

Yeah, well, you have to know what median and mean are too...I was in college (for the second time) before I really understood those (and mode, the third form of 'average').

bernsad, I know just what you mean - it's fun to put in a book new to LT! Do you know about sorting on the Shared column, which (with two clicks) puts all the books that are unique to you at the top? I like going through them (and occasionally find a book that is _not_ unique - needs combining).

Median

Isn't that the thing in the middle of the road so you don't run into other cars going the opposite way?

Ok. I'll go back to my corner

Mmmm.... a la mode.

plbbbbbbbttt to both of you. (grin)

Hi jjmmcgaffey,
Yes, I've found how to sort the shared column and I like to count how many unique works I have. Right now I have 118 of 667 which works out to 18%, or 0.003% of the over 3.5 million unique books on the site, but I wonder how that ranks with the other libraries here. I can't really be bothered searching through everyone else's library to count and then figure out a percentage but I thought it might be an interesting statistic to see who had the most unique library. Certainly that's a figure I'd be more interested in rather than the 50 "Completist" Authors ???

As an aside, it would be handy to have a row number displayed on your library page, just as a sort of place marker, that way when you sort by any column you could quickly figure out which record out of X number you were looking at.

29 > I combined the easy ones so you're now down to 94 unique ones.

>1 Mendoza: Just for fun: I noticed a way to see the usernum for other persons. Go to the link behind the page 1, 2, 3, ... in Your books (for the given person), i.e.

https://www.librarything.com/catalog_bottom.php?view=bnielsen&offset=200

and choose view-source (that's ctrl-u in Chrome).

I came across this while trying to figure out the workings of those links. And remembered this conversation.

We could expose members' user number.

That's the rank, give or take. There are a few holes in the numbering and obviously there are accounts that were deleted by us, or by members.