LT roulette

A button that takes you to a randomly-selected profile page.

Cool. k4k

meh.

With my (rather crap-tacular) luck my first 3 hits would be for spamm-y profiles selling timeshares, web domains, and travel insurance.

Better limit it to paid (and public) accounts.

I don't know what percentage of LT accounts are "active" - I imagine that a significant number are people who created an account, played around for 30 minutes and entered a few books, and then wandered away and never came back. I also don't know how many "active" accounts are private - so getting taken to a page where I can't see anything but a user ID is non-fun.

Tim - I feel a Zeitgeist moment coming on - section for LT user stats - private vs public, free vs. paid, cross-referenced to # of talk posts/helpers badges, free accounts with most turn-over (people adding and subtracting books), time to convert from free to paid, correlations between above?.

I for one, would be very interesting in looking at the the profiles of people who:
1.) Keep 200 books in a free account (with no other "paid" accounts - better wait until after "Collections" comes on board)
2.) Have 200 or more (non-spammy - i.e. not flagged) talk posts
3.) Turn over 10% of their books annually
4.) Have at least one Gold Helper Badge
AND
5.) Have been a member for more than 1 year.

THAT is a dedicated free user - and may qualify for "PortiaLong's Special LT Contributer of Merit LT Scholarship" (i.e. a gift membership).

I kinda like your idea, but I also agree with #3 that it should not include include inactive, private or spammy profiles. I think it would be fun to include author pages and book pages as well as member profiles.

Now that I think about it, this would be pretty cool on the sign in page so that visitors could randomly wander around and take a look without having to know how to wander around.

Why would anyone want to see a random profile? Random books, I can maybe understand (though there's very little chance any random book will be of interest to any particular visitor), but random profile pages??

Like StumbleUpon

AIUI (never having used it), stumbleupon takes you to "random" websites suggested by others with similar interests or something(?)...see the "Recommendations" subtab under Home/Profile for that. But why would you want to see the random profile of some complete stranger (a human, not a book)?

As it is currently is on the (not signed in) main page (not your home page), there are links to the profiles of a few members. These are static. These could change from time to time - reflecting our diverse membership.

> 3

I don't know what percentage of LT accounts are "active"

What do you consider "active"?

3.) Turn over 10% of their books annually

What do you mean by "turn over . . . books"?

9: Not sure what the original means by "active", but turnover in this case would mean deleting 20 old books to add 20 new books.

10: If that's true, I'm not eligible? *pouts* I never delete books from my catalogue unless I accidentally added the wrong edition.

I like the idea of being able to see random profiles, unfiltered, precisely because it would allow me to derive estimates of how many accounts are public/private, free/paid, and what the median (rather than mean) catalog size is, as well as other interesting (to me) site-wide statistics.

And I suspect that this is also precisely why it's not going to happen. :)

10: You're lifetime. 3 was talking about free accounts.

Deleting Books? Aargh!!... ;-) Well, maybe if the actual copy somehow got lost, but otherwise...

We should do random books, random authors, random users, etc. That's the kind of 30-minute feature I might just sneak in on the train home tonight :)

>15 timspalding:
Random tags - I would actually use that one.

Maybe it could be made to show only profiles that have information entered in the 'About me' and/or 'About my library' field(s).

As it is currently is on the (not signed in) main page (not your home page), there are links to the profiles of a few members. These are static. These could change from time to time - reflecting our diverse membership.

I wish that would happen!

craptacular

#15 looking back at some of the past bug reports, I think you already have most of the code :-)

We don't really have a good "how active is this member?" metric. I think we can pick people who'd been on recently, though.

Well, how about limiting it to "people who have edited their profile"? I think the drive-by users (try it out, never come back) don't bother to enter any info in their profiles, usually.

Not to mention, if the profile has never been edited, there isn't much to see there anyway.

Cool; I’m glad this got so much interest and would be easy to do.

>5 PaulFoley:, 7 As to why I suggested this: It occurred to me that there’s no real way to see members you don’t have a connection with. I know about people if they post to a group I post to or if we have shared books, etc., but what about people I don’t have any of those things in common with? Serendipity. That random thing (gift, book, web site, forgotten item in the attic, etc.) you found when you were looking for something else, that turned out ot be delightful.

>3 PortiaLong:, 4. I don’t have a problem with having it be totally random or limiting it in some ways.

Or maybe, "people who have added a book in the past month, and who have edited their profile at least once"? I know people who have come to the site and used it fairly extensively, editing their profile etc., but eventually went away.

> 10

Deleting books? Surely you jest!

I came up with a code for books I have lent or sold; at least their record stays with me, even if my little chick is flying around out there somewhere!

It sounds like there is real interest in being one of the highlighted profiles. Maybe you should sell the privilege! You know, let people who are "Site Sponsors" at a certain level get the honor.

Or have a focus group choose the youngest and most attractive members to highlight (provided, of course, that they are smart and well read but not in a threatening kind of way, and don't have any unappealing quirks displayed on their profile).

Abby and I did that once with profile pictures—made a HUGE page with all of them, so we could pick some examples. We weren't looking for cute, exactly, but we wanted interesting. That was two years ago, at least. One page could NOT contain all the profile pictures today!

Oh, the good old days...

That was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek - I actually think you did a good job of choosing some pretty interesting profile pages there of people who have remained quite active on the site.

To clarify some questions that arose from my post (#3).

>9 lilithcat:/10.

"Active" didn't have a specific definition - depending on how restrictive you wanted to be you could define it by some of the suggestions listed by others. Per Tim in 19 - apparently LT doesn't have a definition that they monitor but they can see if someone has signed on recently.

You (or rather Tim) could of course define "active" anyway you like - I think that most of us would agree that someone who created a free account, entered one book, and never signed in again for 2 years would NOT be considered "active" so I'm not likely to be interested in seeing their profile.

"Turn-over" was indeed removing books to add new ones. The reason I was interested in this metric in free account users is that someone who is an "active" LT user but limited to the 200 books in a free account may be utilizing those 200 books on a rotational basis - to generate recommendations or to reflect their changing interests/current reading. They are taking the time and effort to update their catalogue and utilize what LT has to offer within the limits of those 200 books.

So I personally would consider that person to be more "active" than a free account holder who entered their library through the A's - ran up against the 200 book free cutoff and then never did another thing with their catalogue. (Not saying they might not be "active" in other areas of LT - but I think it is less likely - hence why I would be interested in being able to see such utilization stats on the Zeitgeist page.)
(If you have a paid/unlimited account "turn-over" would no longer be an interesting statistic to me.)

I have a lifetime account BECAUSE turn-over is not an interesting statistic to me!! So uninteresting as to be unheard of.

I get the feeling that I must not have expressed my self very well...

Not everyone has a paid account. (For various reasons - not all of them by choice.)

People who do have a paid account may or may not "turn-over" the books in their catalogue. (This may or may not be interesting to some - but it wasn't where I was going with my post #3.)

People who do NOT have a paid account may "turn-over" books in their catalogue - NOT because they got rid of them but because they wish to interact with LT and its community via a DIFFERENT subset of their books. This, to me, is interesting and displays a degree of dedication. Which is why I brought up the concept of "turn-over" of free accounts as one of the possible markers of "activity."

14> even then, I'd just tag it as "lost" or "missing"...

I forgot to insert my "teasing" smiley, Portia. Sorry. Just reacting in synch with the Mock Horror expressed by others at the thought of getting rid of books. You actually express yourself quite well - and I'll try to remember to indicate when I'm not being serious.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/51641 :)

>30 PortiaLong: I've never even considered this sort of (perverse!!) behaviour. But then again, I signed up for a lifetime account long before hitting the limit :)

I'm curious now as to how many users might be doing that sort of thing, and whether we could figure it out.

>33 timspalding:

Thank you Tim!

When you said above that you might be able to whip it up on the train ride home I was 90% sure you were kidding.

Sweet!

34: Could, yes. Will... depends on how much statistics you guys want to deal with. :)