Quarterly report (Q3 2014)

Preamble

Another quarter has passed, so the time has come for another quarterly report. And here it is.

The good

The third quarter of 2014 was quite productive. We’ve managed to release three alpha versions of Mibew Messenger 2.0.0 (the latest version available for download now is 2.0.0-alpha4) and soon there will be another one. If everything will go according to our plan, we could even try to release the first beta version this year.

Moreover, we started development of some plugins to be released once there will be implemented a convenient user interface for plugins management. Third-party developers will be able to study the code and start developing own plugins (at last).

At the same time the stable version of Mibew Messenger still lives on. This quarter we were told about two security issues in the stable branch of Mibew Messenger, so there were two security releases of Mibew Messenger 1.6.x (the actual stable version is 1.6.14).

We’ve updated and improved the Spanish translation of Mibew Messenger 2.0.0.

And the last but not least. We’ve implemented the SSL encryption on our site.

The bad

The lack of third-party developers willing to participate in the project is our major disaster. We know that Mibew Messenger is used by thousands sites all over the World. And it’s great. We know that many programmers all over the World customized and modified Mibew Messenger. And it’s great too. But they don’t giving back to the project. And it’s sad.

We’ve highlighted the problem before. And it’s still there. For now, our last hope for the reviving of the community is the first beta release of Mibew Messenger 2.0.0. If it will not help, then we’ll seriously revise our informational policy and development strategy.

The miscellanea

And finally some statistics.

The Mibew project has 116 forks of the main repository on Github hosting (10 new forks for the last three months). It has earned stars from 107 users (14 new stars for the last three months) and is watched by 31 developers (2 watchers left us for the last three months). The overall number of commits into the master branch of the main repository is more than 1850 (more than 200 new commits for the last three months, not to mention the commits into the secondary repositories and into the legacy branch).

The average number of downloads of the alpha version of Mibew Messenger 2.0.0 is from 120 to 200 per week. The largest number of downloads made from Brazil (15.37%). Followed by Russia (13.83%), USA (9.27%), China (6.87%), India (4.79%), Turkey (4.29%), and Germany (4.02%).

The average number of downloads of different stable Mibew distributions is from 980 to 1,250 per week. The largest number of downloads made from Brazil (18.88%) and Russia (14.23%). Followed with some margin by downloads made from USA (5.30%), Turkey (5.15%), China (4.36%), India (3.73%), and Mexico (3.62%).

The users’ activity on the project’s forum once again slightly decreased compared to the values of the previous quarter. There is an average 1 new topic every three days, and from 1 to 2 new posts every day. At the same time we don’t tend to perceive it to be a negative phenomena since the number of duplicating and invalid questions on the forum decreased even more drastically. 😉