Our new phpList.org, launched to celebrate phpLists 15th birthday, has an sent mails counter on the home page, which shows us how many emails we sent as a community so far this year. We also know how many emails were sent last  year, and how many countries phpList is used in right now. The tally at the time of launch 5,193,325,899!

Awe Inspiring Magnitude

There is no other way to put it really is there? The day before we launched the site, we asked people to try and guess. The closest guess was 3 million… Let’s face it: phpList sends more mails than out wildest dreams could envisage. We sould be proud!

Holding up a mirror

At the Floss Community Metrics conference in Brussels, I heard a great talk about feedback loops by Kadir Topal  from Mozilla. I realised during this talk how little the phpList community see’s itself: even working as the Community Manager, it’s hard to get a handle on the scale of things most of the time. I think the phpList community sometimes lacks self-confidence too: Open Source gets treated like the underdog all time time after all. So, these statistics say it loud and clear: phpList is big, phpList is popular!

And there we have the feedback element: the community see’s itself in the mirror and says phwaaaar!

What if it’s ugly?

We will be introducing many more feedback loops as the site grows. I am sure, not all of them will make us as happy: when we start looking at the apparently male dominated nature of our user-base, for example. (we saw this in the phpList survey). If we find something we are collectively unhappy with, then we can address the issue together.

Thanks for being amazing!

Anna

phpList

ps: you can find out more about the statistics here.