How do we calculate these statistics?

As a main difference to other open-source LMS systems, we want to make clear how we recover and summarize these statistics. We know (because the same author did it and has since improved his methods) that the scripts that analyse the sites using D0keos are badly flawed and exagerate (up to 10 times) the number of users and sites registered as using it.

Collecting the info

We collect the information on these sites by allowing an opt-in system on the administration page of each portal. This option sends a small summary of the portal information, in the background, to our server. This information contains (exhaustive list):

• The portal name
• The portal URL
• The server's IP address
• The number of users
• The number of courses
• The admin name
• The admin e-mail

This information serves only for two reasons:

• Establish a report of who is using Chamilo, so that the Chamilo community can show off a little of the number of organizations using it
• Establish a list of people that might want to know when we discover critical security issues

The "opt-in" mode means nobody sends any information at all if they don't explicitely require so. There is an additional option allowing admins to send the information but require to be kept anonymous (in this case we don't list their portals but we do count the numbers).

Summing up

Once we get that information, we start filtering it. Everything that contains "localhost", "127.0." or "192.168", which in general mean that these are test portals.
If the campus removes users, we discount them from our totals, so we're only getting the real number of subscribed users on all Chamilo campuses.
Finally, we do not count users of Chamilo 2.0 just yet, we will do that only when it is released as a stable version.

Conclusion

While it is not clear how others calculate these amounts, we try to provide a very clear detail of our active users worldwide. We don't want to be big, we want to be honnest and we provide our best effort to inform you reliably, the same way we strive to give you the best software for education.
Thank you for your interest in Chamilo.

The Chamilo Team can be contacted at info@chamilo.org