Staging testing: Gamers' List

I've updated staging with updated code for the Gamers' List. I'd appreciate people testing it. The only functionality that should be different than prod is I'm filtering out people who haven't activated their accounts as well as people who never used their accounts after activation.

I'm not sure how to test it. I'm seeing that the list is short.
I believe indeed inactive accounts are missing, but I have no idea how to check if there are any that should actually be showing and aren't.

The two checkboxes seem to result in appropriate changes to the shown list. Search narrowing seems to work.

Sorting has an undocumented feature: it puts online players before offline even when sorting order does not indicate that (e.g. oldest to newest swaps the first two items in the list, then swaps the next sequence of [off-line] players). E.g. sort by Oldest returns {FlyingSucculent,vicky_molokh,Keleth}, while Newest returns {vicky_molokh,FlyingSucculent,Tobyzhang}.

Filtering out people who haven't activated their accounts as well as people who never used their accounts after activation cuts the members list by about 325 people. That might seem like a lot but that leaves 18,342 accounts.

If you want to trim it further, I would say eliminate any Inactive Forever accounts with zero posts. I went through the entire Gamers list some time last year, and I bet you could eliminate thousands more that meet that criteria.

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Can confirm Vicky's experience with sorting.

Yah, sorting has always kept online at the front. I'm open to changing that if folks want to discuss it. I think forever inactive accounts with 0 posts and banned accounts can be added. I think long term, we can discuss the value of the page, and what it should actually show.

Keleth, are you talking about making changes on 1.5, are you gathering ideas for 2.0?

One thing I did use it for is to hit up people with interest in particular system/game. I did so by hand when I first joined and was gathering folk - clicked on every profile and if they had the system I was running in their interest field, I'd PM them about it. Perhaps that can be one of the page's uses.

I would even argue Inactive Forever accounts with "a few" posts can be removed. Very often people make an introduction post and then never go beyond that.

Perhaps a general filter for "inactive forever" users can be useful, regardless of how many posts they have? I can see it being handy for the purposes of finding active or semi-active users with specific interests, like reversia.ch mentioned.

Personally I mostly look at the list to see who's online and get a vague sense of a community (and occasionally see an unfamiliar username and go "oooh, who are you?! curious!"), but sometimes I also visit it to see if a specific person is online, often to avoid simultaneous posting in shared games

(And on the main topic, haven't noticed anything unexpected about The Gamers list on staging from mobile, either.)

If there's something simple we can do to improve it right now, I'm open to that (like also filtering out forever inactive with < 5 posts, lets say). Otherwise, we'll have a conversation on how to improve it for v2 later.

Right now, if the page is working, great, I'll move it to prod and keep working on another feature. I'm kinda happy with the rate of progress right now.

I did a breakdown of the distribution of users based on number of posts a few years ago (HERE). The numbers are out of date now, but I expect the trend is still similar. It might help decide what the best cut off would be for the filter. Even just zero posts would remove the vast majority, but might be worth going a bit higher.

Thanks for providing that link, Charlrytharendir. I believe that it will help decide where the best cut off should be.

The sorting appeared to work for me as well.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on a few profiles and saw what others saw regarding different types of inactive players. One of the profiles was someone who had been fairly active on the site and had been absent for only a couple of months. Maybe in addition to the number of posts, it might be worth considering how recently someone became an inactive player.

I'm hoping that the criteria for weeding out the inactive players doesn't get too aggressive. Maybe some of those people who were active will come back, regardless if it's been a year or more. As we all know, life happens.

I think that those accounts with 0 posts who have been inactive for over a year (Inactive Forever!) are fair game. That will eliminate several thousand (by Chalrytharendir's tally it'll be over 13,000) accounts, the vast majority of them. If that number holds, it'll be a 70% reduction in the total number of accounts.

There's certainly a case to be made to eliminate those with one or two token posts who are now inactive forever, but I worry that finding the post cutoff point might get too high.

For now, I'm going to move the staging code to prod, since it's working as expected. We can continue the conversation on improvements for v2.