(note: This is probably interesting to non-edev folkes as an indicator of who uses what, just for the sake of curiosity).
This study is one of the many different users and which theme they use. This was written for many reasons, but mainly it was so that the
administration and members of
edev know which
themes to target in their thinking-about. These stats were taken in October of 2001, in an effort to mainly match
jukka and
ekw usage, and see what ground the fantastic ekw has covered. I thought it would be interesting to see who uses what, and where the
bug priorities should be. The stats are also somewhat surprising, all things considered.
We have two sets of stats; one for all users, and ones that have logged in at least sometime in the last three months.
Three months was chosen as a likely "been
active" point so we can track the difference over time. In a few months we can look back and see the trends in usages.
As a quick
introduction, if you are new here, you can change the way e2 looks in color scheme and basic feel by going to you
Preferences located in the
Epicenter. There are several
basic theme choices, and
e2 jukka theme is the default. Several other themes are merely "
themesettings" and are children of another theme. The largely popular
jukka dim theme settings is a good example of this. Now for the entire user base:
All Users:
Damaged info is when we poll for a theme, and there isn't a
valid theme given. This is largely due to either partially
corrupt settings hashes (in the
setting table), or deleted themes. Also, "
unknown theme" are users that were around before our current theme system was in place. I believe that also includes E1 users, thus the bulk of that number is people whom we haven’t seen in forever. We will roll these users into Jukka for all intents and
purposes, as that is now the default. Our total number is:
Surprisingly
classic has a strong showing in the "long-time" user base. Let's see how it all fares in the last three-month segment.
Users In the last 3 months:
Summed up, the recent playing field (and the most relevant data), looks like:
This reveals several interesting "stats" about the users. At first glace, all ekw users are active; however this is misleading in that really isn't that old. Classic combined is more popular than ekw, which leads us to an serious
question... Does this show a UI design flaw in the way we choose themes in our
Preferences? It's also shows that
default is on it's way out.
Keep in mind that the two actively supported themes are on everything2 are
ekw and
jukka. These are being
developed, one because of a design project, and the other because it's simply the
default theme. When developing features for e2, keep these in mind, but also
remember that a lot of
legacy users use
classic; a surprising number to me at least, so we have to support things in this theme as well. Also; there are a good number of classic settings, and those need to be taken into account. For instance, some elements of E2 are not currently very well balanced with the classic settings (such as
Cool Archive and
User Search). Certain nodelets are somewhat theme specific. We want to avoid this theme adherence at all cost. All bugs on themes should go through
E2 Bugs, where hopefully they will be handled at some point.