SLOWLY stamps – Distribution varies, a LOT

As a quick peak at this chart shows

I received some data from a friend, did a bit of editing to my shared Slowly Stamps API Tracking spreadsheet. Added a new worksheet to it, which tracks the total number of stamps issued, by Country Code as included in the SLOWLY API.

Got some interesting stats; one of them being that the UK currently has the largest number of all (GB, 32 issued), followed by some Asian countries which we had spoken about as receiving a lot of attention... 🙄😉

Made a couple of graphs, added to display this variation. Those are also included in the shared worksheet.

A world map chart shows Geographical distribution

The one on the page banner above, is a live graph in the worksheet. It will be updated any time new stamps are issued as usual (once a day, at 8 am GMT / 08:00 UTC)

The Globe distribution map shows quantity of stamps, by country, in a colour scale. If you click on the map in the spreadsheet, you can see a popup with the Country Code (2 letters) as well as the number of stamps they have in the slider in the bottom LEFT corner of the graph.

Example: Brazil has about 12 or so stamps?

If you click anywhere in Brazil's (or any other country's map), you can notice that slider updating. This happens for all the countries listed in the API database. It gives you a quick idea on how they stand in terms of release numbers.

The map also shows a few areas in light blue without any stamps yet.

There is also a bar graph:

And once again this is LIVE data. If you click on the graph in the spreadsheet, then in any of the bars, you will see a popup with the Country Code, as well as their current stamp total.

Brazil's accurate count is now 14 stamps issued. This info is available for all of the 190 countries on the list and graph.

Even more in future versions, maybe?

My friend's custom Excel workbook has even more advanced info, and it's lovely, but required Excel Professional to run and update the Data from their sources (Slowly API as well as World Population data, etc – 5 External connections).

This is an expensive package (439 USD for the Office Professional package) which I do not have access to, but hopefully I can learn and import some of his ideas into my own, free and shareable Google Sheets page.

Thank you to B. for sharing his own workbook and ideas! 😎👍🍻

Now live in our Google Sheets shareable version too

After some reading and studying, some more editing and testing, we now have a fully sorted listing of ALL Countries and their stamp counts . Thanks again to B. for suggestions and examples.

New functions added this morning, including:

Until now, getting the total count for any given country was a manual count, a tedious process.

Not any more – the worksheet makes this easy and readable, and the data is dynamic; will be updated as soon as any new Slowly stamps are issued and added to the API.

Back in October, my friend M. did that for many countries as we discussed the surprising number of issues appearing for certain countries. From now on, this is much easier and we can visualize the data as well with charts.

Comments about stamps geographical distribution?

Well, we had seen some patterns which repeated over and over; some countries received stamps very frequently in the past year, while many other nations did not have a single stamp at all.

This felt awkward, and when the Slowly Feedback site appeared, it seemed a good place to take some action and propose new Location stamps.

A topic on Reddit even indexed our proposals, with direct links to each; we saw some of them be accepted and become issued stamps, which was very rewarding for all involved. 😎😊

Problems with the Slowly Feedback site

Some of the active users there had some negative experiences, and gradually faded from the site. Pity, as it has a lot of potential, but we felt that:

Examples? the recent issue of 16 personality stamps. Or the island flag issued for a territory which is not an independant nation yet. (while some legit nations didn't have theirs)

Another big issue was the fact we started seeing some tension between users, and the Slowly staff chose not to intervene in some cases – even after explicit requests with their usernames included.

It became clear they did not want to moderate the site, and this made active users wary as we had some friction and no recourse. These users left the site, myself included.

Nowadays, most topics are bare-bones

... 'suggestions' and not 'proposals' (documented, with illustrations, references and more info, etc). Most of the simple posts go unnoticed and unsupported.

It's pretty sad, actually. But... Life goes on. Maybe someday it can improve? Some users like Yolanda Vi$$er and ASRandASR are still active and posting excellent, complete proposals.

We wish them success! 🍀😎👍

Famous Last Words

This post is dedicated to my friend, Russian Cousin, who has kept in touch and incentivated my writing activities, supplying reports of new version releases, bugs, etc. Thanks, friend. 🙂👍

Special thank you to all the folks behind the SLOWLY app.

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