4 ohloh improvements I’d like

I am a stats junkie so I like my stats in large amounts. But I like the stats to be right and as accurate as possible, and when I look at what ohloh produces I like the concepts and ideas in general, I just think their implementation is lacking in a few vital areas that need improvement:

1. There are no dependencies or hierarchies between packages, so “I use this” counters get worthless since people mark end-user packages they use. Low-level support packages and libraries that are used indirectly don’t get many “use counts”

2. Doing very few commits in a very well used project with few authors gives you way way more points than doing a bus-load of commits in something less used with many fellow contributors. This makes the top-list of people very skewed as some of the top-64 people only did a few hundred commits ever. I doubt many mortals would consider someone who only ever did 300 commits to be a top community person. At the very moment I write this, the #1 ranked person has done 20 commits during 5 months…!

3. Too few versioning systems are supported, leaving out huge chunks of the open source world. Bazaar, mercurial and a few more are a bit too popular to be ignored without the results getting skewed.

4. I’d like to see the “number of users” of products as a percentage, as the total number of users they show include all contributors to all projects. Out of the 140,000 users (which undoubtedly include a lot of duplicates), it would surprise me if more than 10,000 have actually registered what products they use. I’ve tried to find the exact number but I failed. So 3,000 users don’t mean 3,000 out of 140,000 but 3,000 out of 10,000…