I created this topic on monday.
So far the first uploaded svg has been downloaded about fifty times and some of the images viewed 130 times.

Still nobody is posting anything in that thread except Lazur and me.
No comment, no question, no new results, no nothing.

Why ?

Is everybody shy ?
Do only people without a forum-account download those files ??

I thought this is a community about Inkscape, the downloads show people are interested in what gets posted and still theres hardly any action.
I dont get it....

Those aren't all people who are "viewing" the topic or the image. So they really are kind of like ghost people!

Search engines and other kinds of spiders and crawlers figure into those statistics as well. At this moment, the index page here is showing 3 search engines on the site. But there are probably more search engines than the forum software is configured to recognize. Afaict, from looking at my own site's statistics, there seems to be more non-human than human visitors! I'm really quite curious about all the traffic that my analytic apps report, but I haven't figured out much of what it all means.

Then there are a suprising number of lurkers, who are real people, who never or almost never post a message. Personally I've read the topic, and learned from it. But I just didn't have any questions, or anything significant to say.

By the way -- quite a load of spam tonight! Yikes!

And those count too

That's what you get when I'm not around for a 12 hour period. Not good.

Spammers are humanoid, "they" post less in the weekend.
They post less from 22 pm to 6 pm (gmt+1)
My guess is that we get most of the spam from the exact same few people, who always register from different ip adresses.
Ever since the refresh the spam is significantly more, and with the "one click ban" gone in the gutter, it takes at least a dozen clicks to clear up the mess.
About half an hour daily for that. Totally not good.

Right, so all these views and downloads are from search-engine-bots ?

Why would they download the svg-files ?


And why do we have those million first question users ?
But hardly any regulars ?

In my humble opinion that's the result of being focused on answering the most basic questions.

General discussion, programming would need developers participating, probably the "show it off" section needs more posts instead.

Lazur URH wrote:In my humble opinion that's the result of being focused on answering the most basic questions.

Yeah a lot of people seem to never have heard of a thing named google.
I dont know...before i would create an account for a forum, i would at least try to see what a google search can do for me.
And Tav's manual does a pretty good job of explaining the program. So do youtube-tutorials.

Its true, some of the finer details are better explained by the experts and there arent that many tutorials when it comes to the "deep" stuff, but still....

Still, blender does things on a much more effective way.
They have a gui fully adjustable, have a fundation and paid developers, and,
a community forum working scales larger.
Speed modeling, weekend challenge, sketchbook, volunteer work, team projects and quality work in the gallery.
Worth a check.

Yes, Blender may be a bigger program and a bigger package. But also takes lot more time to learn that Inkscape.

Why would they download the svg-files ?

I can't answer that one. Maybe they don't. Maybe those 50 downloads are the people who are viewing it (opposed to bots). I'm sure you probably have a silent group of "watchers" out there, who want to look at your files, just for what they can learn. Or there may be some people downloading for negative reasons. I searched the internet with my username once, and found a few of my images around the internet, which people were using without my permission. It's part of the reason I don't share my SVG files very often. (And now I search my name a couple of times per year, just so I can take care of those.)

They post less from 22 pm to 6 pm (gmt+1)

Yes, routinely over the past month, I can depend on finding 4 or 5 new spams between midnight and 1 am (MST), which I think is 7 to 8 am GMT.

I think the situation where we have 10 to 20 dedicated members who visit daily to weekly, answering questions that are posted; and otherwise, people (newbies) join, ask a few questions, and never come back; is just the nature of being a support forum.

And besides that, Inkscape is generally not a tool that most people use every day -- except for graphics artists. The non-artist community uses it only now and then.

Btw, Esper, I'm ready to start with more challenges and contests at IC. (finally almost finished with my "raster to vector" series of tutorials) I like your idea of showing some kind of image, and the challenge is to find a way to re-create it with Inkscape. I've been keeping my eyes peeled for a good candidate image, but I haven't found one yet. But if you come across any, let me know. You could either post the challenge yourself, or tell me about it, and I'll post it.

brynn wrote:I like your idea of showing some kind of image, and the challenge is to find a way to re-create it with Inkscape. I've been keeping my eyes peeled for a good candidate image, but I haven't found one yet. But if you come across any, let me know. You could either post the challenge yourself, or tell me about it, and I'll post it.

I was thinking of doing those hipster logos that are popular at the moment (do a google image search), but it may be a bit too generic.

Obviously a challenge could be made out of the arched halftone texteffect Lazur helped me to achieve.

Or maybe something that people actually want to use. So maybe something like a christmas card (although that is not really my kind of thing).

Hipster logo? At first I was thinking that meant some kind of 60s psychdelic type of image. But this my search result: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hipster+logo&t=ffsb#. What I haven't found yet is a description of what makes a hipster logo. Once we have that, we can go.

Looks like the definition is black and white, and relatively simple. I'll keep searching.

Edit
Found this: http://hipsterlogo.com/
And this: https://stocklogos.com/topic/what-defin ... style-logo

It's still unclear, to me, what makes those logos "hip". They seem rather "un-hip" to me. Unless "hipster" refers to the 50s? They do seem a little 50s-ish. Who was that poet/author, 50s/60s, counter-culture. I'll never think of his name.... Found it - Jack Kerouac

brynn wrote:Hipster logo? At first I was thinking that meant some kind of 60s psychdelic type of image. But this my search result: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hipster+logo&t=ffsb#. What I haven't found yet is a description of what makes a hipster logo. Once we have that, we can go.

Looks like the definition is black and white.... I'll keep searching.

It has become pretty stereotype. Its a minimalistic retro (50ies i think) style, mostly b/w, yes.
Like this:
https://d3ui957tjb5bqd.cloudfront.net/i ... 1414176272

Or this:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Tronix101design/videos


Another idea is to make something with chains.
This tutorial show an interesting result:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08zqdw-L0i0
or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZTNMehg0Q

see my edit to previous msg - you posted while I was searching

brynn wrote:It's still unclear, to me, what makes those logos "hip". They seem rather "un-hip" to me. Unless "hipster" refers to the 50s? They do seem a little 50s-ish. Who was that poet/author, 50s/60s, counter-culture. I'll never think of his name.... Found it - Jack Kerouac

Cant tell you if its related to Jack Kerouac, but your cliche hipster would be a tatooed, bearded, skinny jeans and plaid shirted guy with an undercut and fifties frames. Maybe stretched earlobes. Etc.
Everything that has been considered hip in recent years.
This movement is basically over and hipster a dirty word.
But thats not the point.

This hipster style logo is all over the internet, is relatively easy to make and there are loads of templates. So thats why i thought it might be a good idea, to make a challenge around these type of logos.

There are tons of tutorial on youtube on how to do this style, and some of them are absolutely laughable when a professional designer needs 20 min to get two types of text on a path in Illustrator.

I don't know why Kerouac came to mind when I was looking at all those logos. But at least I made a connection. I'm really out of the loop, as far as current styles and such.

Yes, I saw a lot of tuts and templates in my search. But they do look relatively easy to do.

Yeah we can defintely do that! You're welcome to start the topic, or I can do it, if you'd rather not. Should we come up with some kind of imaginary products or company or something? Or just leave it wide open?

Here are a few quick sketches.

EDIT: image now over at inkscapecommunity.

Since you posted those here, I wasn't sure if you still wanted to make a challenge at IC. But I do want to try some more challenges and contests, so I made it anyway: http://forum.inkscapecommunity.com/inde ... opic=298.0

One week later: 130 downloads. My ass.