Ideas Tracker launched
Posted by Huw,
Sariel, author of a number of useful software tools for AFOLs, has just launched his latest project: Ideas Tracker.
He says "Ideas Tracker has been developed to answer a single question: how is the LEGO Ideas project I'm interested in doing?
"The LEGO Ideas website provides analytic tools only for project owners and I wanted to make it more transparent, so that anyone has access to any project's statistics. To this end, Ideas Tracker is refreshed once a day and records information about every LEGO Ideas project that's currently gathering support or has already achieved it.
"Then, by comparing daily changes, trends can be observed, and some statistical future projections can be made. For example, you can see if the daily number of votes for a particular project is higher than the minimum required to hit the next milestone.
"The site is free to use, with no ads and no need to log in. I'm hoping to add more features in the future, such as an option to compare how two projects are doing."
The amount of information there is almost overwhelming, but if you have an interest in the Ideas platform and like to deep-dive into graphs, statistics and figures, you will find it all very interesting.
Head on over to IdeasTracker.com to take a look, and if you have any comments or suggestions for improvement I am sure Sariel will be pleased to read them.
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21 comments on this article
I was surprised to find that the Ideas website doesn't already have these kind of analytics built in for project owners. I made one in Excel to track the progress of my own, but it was very manual and not user-friendly. This looks great!
On projects tab, interesting to see the average votes per day of the 3000+ live entries, any new comments and being able to jump straight to those that look most popular. Just found out that I'm getting 0.4 votes a day, so only 68 years to go! There are also 1623 live authors, and I'm around 1420 in popularity!
Is there is a way of going back in time...both individually and total projects (beyond last 20 days)?
This is very useful...I am looking forward to his clock project getting supported in the next round.
And I see that my project needs to have 6 times as many votes per day if it wants to meet the target unfortunately.
The thing is I don't know how to better promote my project the biggest problem I think is that I only have flicker as a platform with only 26 followers.
Maybe if you can help here on brickset?
https://ideas.lego.com/s/p:ddb75bfdf7644f8386cb25501c7a685e
Awesome.
Since I am kind of an analytics nerd myself I can appreciate the effort.
Thank you very much @Sariel, and @Huw for pointing it out!
Wow! My project is getting an average 76 votes per day. I guess people really like medieval builds. https://ideas.lego.com/s/p:850f7f9538764ce5b37303bc9a98988f
In case you need the ID to test the Tracker: 399b51bb-e7d2-41c4-a8ef-ef0ccfea64f1
Yeah, a cheap joke :)
It's astounding that the main Ideas website doesn't include much this. They don't even list when a project was first submitted from what I can tell.
Something that would be nice to look at would be the historical records of project which achieved support. It's nice to see how those progressed, beyond estimating off the four Lego automated posts.
Took a quick look. This is pretty darn cool. I'll need to go back and spend some more time digging deeper. Great job!
Interesting, I wonder if this could be used to determine the most popular themes, check that against the type of entries that seem to win and then create a set based on that data.
However, even then, I think it would be the promotion as @tvjelle pointed out.
On the released sets table I think dates would be useful - date accepted, date released. I have been half thinking of making a table myself, as it seems like the gap is getting longer and longer....
Also, it would be nice if the site were responsive on mobile, but I appreciate that may be a lot of work!
I feel like, if the “voting history” and “gathering support” sections were flipped, James Bond would approve of this.
This is awesome! Thanks so much Sariel. I already use your other web tools as well!
Interesting proposition, very factual and visual, therefore effective.
The only criticism: the color of "realized" and "accepted" is almost the same. They should really be differentiated (red on one of the two for example). Otherwise, I think this site must have required a lot of work, so thank you very much.
Sariel, when it comes to building amazing (and so well engineered) lego models or developing useful apps, is some kind of a magician.
That 75% rejected shows us a very unfavorable picture about LEGO's willingness/capacity of making a new IDEAS set.
This is excellent! By the way, it would be really good to have a version for Lego World Builder as well.
Hi, I'm the creator of the motorized howl's moving castle and I thank you for making this thing happen. I have a few Ideas:
Regarding staff picks related stats:
-Difference of votes 5/10/15 days -/+ the staff pick, to see how much a staff pick could affect the trajectory of a project.
-Rank projects by percentile according to their age:
For instance, a 1 day old project is succeptible to accumulate more votes than a 9 month old project due to exposure, but this factor alone isn't telling the whole story as of which project has a better odd of getting to 10k.
Average the number of votes of all project on their x th day to have a realistic comparison with the trajectory.
Possibility to separate and filter the projects that has a staffpick.
-re-estimating the 10K date according to the number of votes on the last few days (trend) instead of the lifelong average, since projects get votes faster after they reach 9K for example.
-Live spray chart of all projects, with the age of the project on X and number of votes on Y
possibility to have one each day, and overlaying them for animation
Those data would be able to draw conclusions such as:
My project is doomed, unless it gets a staffpick before such date that would give it a 30 percent chance if making it to the next stage.
Is it possible as creator of the project to be able to input some sourcecode to have the complete set of data since day 1? Would be interesting.
@Sariel A very well programmed site with useful graphs and info's. Kudos for the work!
Make it work on mobile please
Where do we submit feature requests?
In addition to tracking daily supporters and comments, I've been wanting to track changes to a project's feed_score.
This field is returned in responses to searches for projects in Ideas and it determines what order projects appear on the frontpage (which is the key to the most lucrative promotion spot). I would love to be able to plot fead_score against comments and supports to try to reverse engineer how it's calculated.