The Activity Config Guide
Helpful information on configuring the Activity Modification for vB3.5
by WetWired the Unbound

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Intro
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  "Weeks Reflected?" "Counted posts per day?" "Visit weighting?" Even with the 
precise description of what these settings do in the control panel, what they
mean for you very well may not be clear.  The purpose of this short guide is 
to explain how these settings will effect the activity of your members.

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What is activity, anyway?

  Activity was concieved as a way for a new user to easily tell who is active 
in the community.  Now, you might think to yourself "I thought that's what the
post count was for."  In a way it is; post count does tell you who has posted
the most over the life of the board, but what if a new user wanted to know who
was active *now*?  Should the advice of a poster who's been faithfully posting
for the past month be overlooked in favor of the advice of a member who was
active in the past but really doesn't visit much any more?  The Activity
Modification gives you a metric of who is active, now.

  The Activity Modification looks at a log of visits it keeps, as well as posts
in forums where posts count in order to determine a user's activity level.  You
may think visiting isn't what's important, posting is; to a point I agree with
you, but isn't visiting every day an indication of devotion to the events of 
the community?  In any case, each day for the past so many days, a user is
evaluated on whether they even visited, and if they did, how many times they
posted that day.  Then, the mod takes the information for these days, and it
determines which days are more important based on how long ago they were.  The
final result is the activity level you see beside each user's post.

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How do these settings factor in?

Weeks Reflected
  At its simplest, this is how far back the mod looks when deciding a user's
activity.  If you set this to 1 week, then activity level will be based off of
users' actions only in the past week; if you set this to 6 weeks, then the
activity level will be based off of the events of the past month and a half.  
If things move fast in your community, a low setting might be a good idea, but 
if things move slower, a higher setting would be advised.

Counted posts per day
  Think of this as anti-spam.  This setting limits the number of posts the mod
considers for a user for one day.  Think about your average active member; how
many posts do they consistantly post per day?  You should set this setting
arround this number of posts per day.

Visit Weighting
  Maybe you don't really care about members who visit every day but don't post,
maybe you do.  This is where you express this opinion.  A lower number means
that visiting isn't very important, whereas a higher number means that visiting
is important.  To be exact, the setting is the importance of visiting compared
to posting once.  Only one visit per day is counted.

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Conclusion
  
  I hope that this guide has been useful to your understanding of how the 
activity mod works and what its settings do.  If after reading this guide, you
still have questions, I invite you to post them in the thread for the activity
modification on vBulletin.org.


