To round out this series, we’ll look at the different categories of extensions that people like to download.

The list of extension categories is:

• Official Extensions
• Cosmetic
• Tools
• Security
• Communication
• Profile/User Control Panel
• Add-Ons
• Anti-Spam
• Entertainment
• Miscellaneous

Overview of extension categories:

It’s worth mentioning that the download figures will not add up to the total extension downloads from part four, because some extensions belong to more than one category.

Add-Ons are the most popular type of extension, most likely due to their broad nature, with all of the top 10 most downloaded extensions belonging to this category (among others).

Official Extensions get downloaded in huge numbers due to their high profile, while some of the most downloaded extensions like Board Announcements and Advanced BBCode Box 3.1 belong to the Communication category.

Interestingly Anti-Spam extensions don’t feature highly, but with that said it’s probably a good thing if additional measures are not required to keep the spambots at bay.

This brings to a conclusion the phpBB Numerology series. I hope those that appreciate their statistics – or have a general interest in phpBB and its user submitted customisations – have enjoyed these last five blog posts.

MODs, extensions and styles are what immediately come to mind when thinking of the phpBB.com customisation database, but there are other types of customisations too.

This part of phpBB Numerology takes a look at every type of customisation.

Overview of all customisation downloads:

There are some obvious anomalies in the data (like the Viewtopic Birthday MOD) which haven’t been removed from this raw analysis. With that said, this data still gives a fairly accurate representation of how people use the customisation database.

The first figure that sticks out in this table is the the 52.02 views per download for bbCode. This is disingenuous. Taking the fairly popular bbCode “Open URL in new window” as an example, it’s had 8026 views and 0 downloads. Why is this? Because there is nothing to download – the instructions are on the main contribution page: https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/bbcode/open_url_in_new_window/

MODs, due to their prevalence in the phpBB2 and phpBB 3.0 era, are still the undisputed king of the customisation database and will take some catching up. Styles may catch up in the medium term though, as it’s a forever expanding customisation type in phpBB 3.1.

It’s not surprising to see phpBB tools well represented on the list. AutoMOD and UMIL alone represented 208757 and 151820 downloads respectively – very popular tools. Converters and Bridges round out the top 8, being quite niche categories.

As noted earlier, the figures may be a little high due to anomalies but after taking into account off-site downloads through development topics and the like the numbers may actually be conservative. It’s therefore very pleasing for everyone involved in the phpBB community, and something to be very proud of, that phpBB customisations have exceed 15 million downloads.

For the fifth and final part of phpBB Numerology we’ll go back to where it all started – extensions – and take a closer look at the categories of extensions that are most popular.

After two weeks of voting and a bit of back and forth between the four candidates, we now have a final winner for the codename of our next version:

Proteus

With Proteus we’ll be moving on from Saturn and continue our deep space journey to Neptune’s second largest moon (based on the name Proteus, the shape-changing sea god of Greek mythology).

We’ll be updating the release process page in the next few weeks to reflect this as well as to update current maintenance periods and target release timeframes.

Thanks to everyone for participating in this vote!

For the second blog post in this series I thought it would be interesting to do a direct comparison with the data presented in the 2011 post.

Most downloaded phpBB3 MODs:

There are a few figures which are unrealistic, which have been struck out accordingly. For example, “User recent activity” apparently has nearly 80,000 downloads while its customisation page has only had 5300 page views.

The most significant movers and shakers were the Advanced BBCode Box 3 MOD, which had a huge spike in downloads in moved up 18 positions from 2011. The ReIMG Image Resizer also experienced a spike, but due to its favourable position in 2011 only moved up 7 places. None of the top 10 from 2011 experienced large drops.

Most downloaded MOD/extension authors (primary authors for phpBB2 and phpBB3):

Due to the overwhelming successes of the Attachment MOD and Cash MOD for phpBB2, both Acyd Burn and Xore remain among the most downloaded phpBB MOD/extension authors of all time.

nickvergessen is the third most downloaded author of all time, despite not having any entries in the top 10 downloads for an individual customisation. This is because two of his submissions are/were highly popular and fall just outside the top 10 of their respective lists; phpBB Gallery for 3.1.x has 57,070 downloads while NV advanced last topic titles for 3.0.x has 49,372 downloads.

In part three of this series, we’ll look at the most downloaded language packs for phpBB which will also offer some insights into which regions phpBB is most popular.