Display group statistics?

[jialin]

Is there any way to automatically display statistics about certain groups (not all groups, just the ones that I choose) that I have placed characters into, such as how many male and female characters (this is a role playing site) there are in each group? I want it to update by itself so that it will always reflect the accurate numbers. I have tried to do this myself, but I can't seem to figure out how to access the variables this information is stored in. The result should look something like this:

Race	Male	Female	Total
Humans	8	6	14
Elves	3	4	7
Other	0	2	2

If there is a widget or plugin that does this, that would work too! I just haven't been able to find anything. Thanks in advance to anyone who might be able to help me out.

[Brian]

If you're referring to member groups the only place that information is available is in the Groups tab of your profile. There's no way to make a code or template modification output it automatically.

[jialin]

Brian , thank you for your reply!

I am referring to member groups, yes. Would a plugin be able to accomplish this? If so, I'll head over and ask around.

[Brian]

Plugins are technically just codes with a user interface, so there's unfortunately no way for a plugin to accomplish this either since they fall under the classification within my previous post.

[jialin]

Oh, got it. I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions. I just have one more (I think, lol). Disregarding member groups entirely, if I were to go about this a different way, and use a custom field to label a character's race instead, could I then access that information to display on the home page how many characters at the site were human or elven, etc? I feel like the answer is still going to be a no, since I can't think of a way to do that without storing a variable somewhere... but I'd rather ask than spend hours trying to do it and getting nowhere.

[Brian]

That wouldn't work either. Sorry.

The forum will only load information relevant to the page you're currently viewing because that information has to be reobtained every time it's needed. Anything that isn't considered necessary for a certain page of the forum won't be loaded in any way on that page so that the servers don't have to load more data for each page load.

The only things that you can get to show on every page are whatever data is output by each of the variables listed in the sidebar in Themes > Layout Templates > Forum Wrapper. Pretty much the only useful stuff there is everything listed under the $[current_user] variable which can only output information from your account on the page.

[jialin]

Aww, well. If it can't be done, it can't be done. You've saved me lots and lots of time though, so thank you for that, and for explaining how everything works. I really appreciate it.