Recently we added few new members to our WhatsApp chat and the activity in the group spiked up. Although it was a minor annoyance to see 65+ unread messages in the group everytime you open the app, I was happy that the newcomers have made themselves at home.
But has the Gavel Chat always stayed the same? what happened through the years? I went to find out.
There’s this neat trick of emailing your WhatsApp chats to yourself. You go to any group or a personal chat and you will notice in the settings to email the chat. From that you will get a text file containing the messages, the time it was sent and the sender.
As soon as I opened the text file I was filled with nostalgia. The WhatsApp chat is a timeline of all the important events the club went through. The halloween, the competitions, inside jokes and drama.
This gavel group was created on 14th August 2016 by Gv Harinda. And now we have 72 members and it’s increasing everyday. So how has the club been over the years.
So using python to parse through the messages, these are the results that I found.
Group Activity over Time
On average our group gets about 50 messages per day. But this hasn’t always been consistant. It has peaked and died out at different times. I tried to find any correlation to activity with respect to timing of exams or vacations but there isn’t a clear distinction. Except some of the peaks seemed to fall on Wednesdays and Saturdays. It could be because of Educational meetings and GUTT meetings.
The highest peak we’ve ever had was very recent, it’s on 3rd March to be exact. This was because we tweeted a join link to our WhatsApp group which resulted in several freshers joining in the begining of March. With the excitement of joining a new club they have been very active in the group chat. Because of that the group received 343 messages on that day.
Group activity through the day.
This is very predictable. There’s a peak of activity around 9.00pm when most students get to go home and relax.
But there have been some instances of Gaveliers having trouble sleeping. So it’s perfectly normal to expect a message asking when the next GUTT meeting is at 4 in the morning. Typical Shayen.
Finally the Most Active Users
So this was what I was interested when I started this project. The most active users in the group. And to no one’s surprise #1 spot is reserved for Harrith. With his enthusiasm when a new event comes up or him being his usual self when someone needs to be roasted, he sure sends a lot of messages.
| # | Name | Messages |
| 1 | Harith | 973 |
| 3 | Warren | 934 |
| 4 | Prabath | 840 |
| 5 | Malin | 832 |
| 6 | Oshira | 744 |
| 7 | Shayen | 723 |
| 8 | Shaik | 649 |
| 9 | Harinda | 520 |
| 10 | Vinura | 519 |
| 11 | Hansi | 501 |
| 12 | Paba | 492 |
| 13 | Sathya | 487 |
| 14 | Fadil | 405 |
| 15 | Sithumi | 389 |
| 16 | Pasindu | 349 |
| 17 | Nishadi | 186 |
| 18 | Chamalka | 172 |
| 19 | Vimukthini | 168 |
| 20 | Ramalka | 156 |
| 21 | Kumudika | 138 |
| 22 | Saanaaree | 126 |
| 23 | Chai | 88 |
| 24 | Tavini | 65 |
| 25 | Oshadi | 54 |
Where to go from here.
In the future I’m expecting to generate a word cloud from the chat, to find out the most used words and phrases in the group.
source files: https://github.com/prab4th/WhatsApp-Chat-Analyser
Data analysis and writing done by: Prabath Swarna Sri Meemaduma
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