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Announcement
· Jan 4, 2023

Top Questions about InterSystems Data Platforms for 2022

#Digest #Developer Community Official
Hey Community, 
Here is the 2022 Annual Dev Community Question Digest. Let's check out the most popular questions from InterSystems Developers!
General Stats
✓ 870 questions published in 2022
✓ 6,546 questions published all time
Most Popular

Most Discussed
Discussion (6)5
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Rob Tweed · Jan 5, 2023

An observation: the administrators of this forum regularly report the size of this community, currently an impressive number in excess of 12,000 developers, yet, as can be seen from the OP, numbers of views of even the most popular posts is tiny by comparison.  From what I've seen, a typical post will get around about 50 views, and each comment will add a further 50 - a meagre 0.4% of the total community.  This leads me to believe that there is actually only a small core (~50?) of regular contributors and readers (many of whom, I suspect, are actually ISC employees)

It does make me wonder what, if anything, most of those 12,000 Cache/IRIS developers read, and what site(s) they use instead. Perhaps they don't read anything? 

My reason for raising this is that, for a third-party developer of solutions for these technologies, reaching and informing those 12,000 developers is a significant issue and problem, and it's fairly clear to me that this forum currently doesn't provide a very effective solution to that problem.

My question/challenge for 2023 is therefore what do folks here (the regular 50?) think can be done to provide a more effective way to reach that reported developer base?

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Dmitry Maslennikov · Jan 5, 2023

When the google group was quite active, years ago, I did some analytics as well, and as I remember, there were quite similar numbers as well. And we had a dedicated Russian forum and had just about 10 active people there.

My suggestion is, that, Developers on InterSystems technologies are not used to using the Internet for their issues. They probably may ask colleagues by company, but not the Internet. As you would see on StackOverflow, there is a huge amount of questions and answers on any language and technology. And even so, we have jokes, that some developers write code by copy-pasting code from StackOverflow. But apparently, it's not the case with ObjectScript and IRIS. And we have just a few questions per year on StackOverflow and only a couple or so people who would answer there.

So, I think, InterSystems developers mostly prefer to solve issues on their own. And this is a main issue as well. Because they may miss some new features that appeared in the technology, some useful projects or technics.

And I'm sure that, any involved developer should be part of spreading the importance of using DC amongst his colleagues and encourage them of using it, at least to read articles. 

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Evgeny Shvarov · Jan 5, 2023

The amount of contributors every month is about 200-250. The amount of different contributors through the year is about 1,000.

So the core, or the amount of "regular" contributors is about 100-150. It is about 1% of the 12,000 registered members. And in fact this is quite typical for communities.

But the amount of readers is much bigger. 12K is the amount of registered members. And a lot of "readers" don't register. Last month we had more than 100K different people (not bots) visiting only the English site of the community. Add also about 30K audience of French, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese communities. And this amount is growing.

But I see your question, Rob - how to reach out 12K and how to reach monthly 100K audience. The answer is quite simple - publish an interesting and relevant content. 

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Ben Spead · Jan 5, 2023

Evgeny - if you can track non-registered users on the side, do they get included in the "View Count" for each article?  Or do only logged in readers get counted?

Another contributing factor in the underreporting of readers is the participants who read the articles via email.  I at least scan every article and question on the D.C. via my Inbox as I prefer an email-centric workflow.  However, I am counted as a 'reader' only on those articles and questions which I decide to comment on or answer.  I am sure I am not the only one consuming the D.C. content in this way.

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