User group downturn?

[Dave Smith]

On Dec 1, 2012, at 5:10 PM, Jima wrote:

> To be fair, over the last 5+ years I've observed a number of LUGs 
> experience a similar downturn in interest

Indeed, I've seen the same downturn in all groups where I participate. I just happened to use data from PLUG to illustrate the point (no offense intended to PLUG members or leadership, both of which are top notch in my book).

>  What'd you use to generate the graph?

This python script outputs the PLUG stats as CSV, which I pasted into Excel for graphing. You'll need "requests", which is available via pip:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
import requests, re

for (year, month) in [(year, month) for year in range(2005, 2013) for month in range(1, 13)]:
    month_name = datetime(year, month, 1).strftime("%B")
    url = "http://plug.org/pipermail/plug/{0}-{1}/subject.html".format(year, month_name)
    response = requests.get(url)
    if response.status_code != 200:
        break
    matches = re.findall("<b>Messages: *</b> *(\d+)", response.text)
    if not matches:
        break
    print "{0},{1},{2}".format(year, month, int(matches[0]))