Chartocalypse

Did the chart thing (previously mentioned here). Tested with both greasemonkey on Firefox and tampermonkey on Chrome. Other userscript plugins exist for other browsers, but I'm not going to test them. Read all about it here.

This is the part where I tell you that going off and installing userscripts (or any type of software!) just because some weirdo on the horseternet told you it was cool can be a dangerous habit. You can totally trust me when I say I'm not doing anything malicious here, but I sure wouldn't. If you're code literate, you can look at the source here. If not, maybe try to get the opinion of someone who is, or, uh, proceed with caution.

Here's the install link:
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/46ebb22af1f9ff079862/raw/969a72cc454dffac974b0be875adf54d986bc80b/fimgraphs.user.js

If you have tampermonkey or greasemonkey installed they will prompt you to install the script as soon as you hit it - then you'll need to reload fimfiction before it actually does stuff. Chrome also has some native support for userscripts, but I don't know the whole deal there because I use tampermonkey. I don't know how other setups will behave, so you may have to read the help for your thinger if you want to trailblaze.

Features!

So there's four graph types, and one of them is a referrers pie chart which is totally boring. On the three time-series charts (accumulations, ratios, events by day) you can turn on and off a given series by clicking its label on the graph key. You can also zoom in by clicking and dragging across the chart area. That pretty much covers chart usage.

If you are next-level crazy, you can hit the raw data button. A little box will pop up over the chart area demanding that you hit ctrl-c -- best to do what it says, or things might get ugly. Now in your clipboard is all the data used to generate these charts, in spreadsheet-friendly format. Paste it into excel or google docs or whatever and go nuts.

Limitations!
Turns out the server only sends day-by-day view data for the last 60 or so days. I didn't actually know about that until today, because my only story only just crossed that threshold like a minute ago and I wasn't testing on other stories just yet. The script estimates the amount of views your story has before the cutoff by checking the sum of available data against the total count listed for the story, but that brings us to issue two with view counts: they don't match up. You can see this on the old charts too - the sum of the daily tallies does not match the total listed up top. Mine was off by about five until the oldest days started getting cut out. Now it matches up perfectly, because I have no choice but to pretend that it should. Obviously, any ratios involving views will be nonexistent outside the period for which we have actual data. All life is suffering.

Similarly, it only sends data for the last 100 favorites. To avoid the effects of these limitations, I recommend having only stories under 60 days old with fewer than 100 favorites.

So that's a bummer - be sure to talk to your local representative about a proper stats api for fimfiction. It's important that we be very demanding towards the people who already put in a ridiculous amount of effort to let us swap deranged tentacle fantasies tales of delightful horse hijinks.

Comments

[CartsBeforeHorses]

Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks!

[djthomp]

Similarly, it only sends data for the last 100 favorites. To avoid the effects of these limitations, I recommend having only stories under 60 days old with fewer than 100 favorites.

Hahaha. Sounds perfectly logical to me!