Exploration of Quantitative Factors Affecting the Popularity of Users in an Online Community

Online communities for discussing different topics have been around since the dawn of the Internet. Whether an individual user is popular or not in the community is highly subjective and difficult to measure with a quantitative approach. In this paper we explore factors and usage patterns on a Finnish football related online community FutisForum2 for receiving votes in a yearly voting for Forum User of the Year. Several quantitative factors are identified in order to calculate correlations between each factor and the yearly voting results. These factors include yearly message network centrality figures, number of message, user quote amounts, number of characters in messages, etc. Although message amounts clearly correlate with the voting results, the strongest correlation was noticed when comparing eigenvector centrality to the voting results. The main outcome of the project was also generation of a database of 11 million messages for further research.