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Studying Forum Dynamics from a User Experience Perspective
Andrey Kan
Digital Enterprise
Research Institute
NUI Galway Ireland
akan@csse.unimelb.edu.au
Online forums provide extensive conversation
records of users across time. An analysis that
specifically addresses the temporal dimension can
reveal patterns that are not obvious from the statistics
aggregated over time. Such an analysis can facilitate the
mathematical modeling of conversations and the
administration of forums. In this paper, we focus on
studying the temporal characteristics of users' behavior
in forums.
There has been a number of studies on forums [1, 2],
but most of them do not focus on experience of
individual users over time. The experience of users can
be visualized with AuthorLines [3], but with this
method it is hard to compare the temporal patterns
across many users.
We propose to represent a user's communication
experience as a path in a space of user features. In this
paper, we focus on two features -- the number of posts
made and the number of replies received. In this case, a
user path is a line in the 2D space. The path starts at
point (0, 0) and whenever a user makes a post the path
moves one unit right. Whenever the user receives a
reply the path moves up one unit. The path can be
interpreted as shown in Fig. 1. The dynamics of a forum
can be captured with the paths of participating users.
We applied our method to users in forums from
Boards.ie, a large multi-topical Irish forum board, and
report 3 main findings. First, we found that straight line
can be used as an approximation to a user path. This
observation has a direct implication for modeling of
user experience over time. Note that aggregated
post/reply ratio statistics is not sufficient to discover this
pattern.
Next, we found that there are “dead zones” in the
feature space: e.g., users did not go far to the right along
x-axis. This observation can help in establishing
normative user behavior and discovering outliers (e.g.,
spammers in “dead zones”).
Last, we found that we can use the paths for an
interpretable visualization and categorization of forums.
This is done by extracting macro features that
summarize forum appearance, such as the mean length
and slope of user paths.
While previous forum visualizations [3] have their
advantages, our plot is more straightforward to interpret
in terms of reciprocity of communication. For example,
we observe that the slope of the “gigs” forum is closer
to x-axis than the slope of the “soccer” forum. This
indicates that “gigs” is more an announcement style
Jeffrey Chan
Digital Enterprise
Research Institute
NUI Galway Ireland
jkc.chan@deri.org
95
Conor Hayes
Digital Enterprise
Research Institute
NUI Galway Ireland
conor.hayes@deri.org
forum (many posts are left without replies), whereas
“soccer” is more oriented towards a balanced
conversation. Our visualization and clustering results
provide forum owners with intuitive techniques for
interpreting the behavior of contributors over time.
Figure 1. Two sample user paths. The longer path
represents a more active user. The average slope of the
path represents the nature of communication. For
example, a path closer to x-axis contains longer
consecutive posting sequences. Such a path can be
classified as a “monologue”.
We emphasize the flexibility and generality of our
approach, since it can be applied to other domains, such
as email or phone communications, replacing the
numbers of posts and replies by the numbers of sent and
received emails or outgoing and incoming calls
respectively. Further, the paths can be constructed using
different user features. Finally, our analysis can be
performed on the collective experiences of communities
rather than individual users.
References
[1] J. Chan and C. Hayes, “Decomposing Discussion Forums
using User Roles,” in Proc. of the 2nd Web Sci. Conf., 2010.
[2] R. Kumar, M. Mahdian, and M. McGlohon, “Dynamics of
conversations,” in Proc. of the 16th ACM SIGKDD Internl.
Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2010.
[3] F. Viégas and M. Smith, “Newsgroup crowds and
authorlines: Visualizing the activity of individuals in
conversational cyberspaces,” in Proc. of the 37th IEEE
Annual Hawaii Internl. Conf., 2004.