Knowing the number of watchers

Feature
,
1

I think I bought this up way back when I first started testing the platform.
Will there ever be a way to know how many people are subscribing (watching) a particular topic?

I am being asked for this information more often these days.

2 Likes
2

This seems unlikely to ever be added as visible to non-administrators.

The freedom of individual users to choose how they want to consume the forum is important, and giving special consideration to Watching a topic by making the number visible to everyone is likely to create bad behavior patterns. (Number Go Up Syndrome is very powerful.)

You should be able to take a Data Explorer query that gets this data and mark it as runnable by moderators or employees, if that’s who the requests are coming from.

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3

We would never want this for non-admins. I will try this with the DE.

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4

Was this ability ever added to Discourse reporting?

5

Were there any updates to this?

7

Hi Tom,

This has not been added as a default DE report. However I found a topic that provides a basic DE query to pull this information, maybe that will be helpful:

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8

Hi Mark,

Thanks. So from this it looks like I cannot perform this function at the topic level. Is this correct?

9

Tom,

No, you can get that info at a topic level by swapping ‘topic’ for ‘category’ like this:

SELECT 
  COUNT(topic_id)
FROM 
  topic_users 
WHERE 
  notification_level = 3

Again, this is a very basic query that just returns a total count of watchers from…in this case…all topics. If you want to specify a particular topic, you could add to the WHERE clause, e.g:

WHERE 
  notification_level = 3
  AND topic_id = 29
8 Likes
10

This is great!

Thank you!

1 Like
11

This is very useful, thanks @MarkDoerr. I modified the query to report on all four notification levels in one pass, and to take an array of topic_ids if needed.
The full grid output table isn’t pretty but has all the info I need.

edit: of course as soon as I posted, Discourse kindly showed me six links with other ways of solving this! Query on!

SELECT 
  topic_id,
  notification_level,
  COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 0 THEN topic_id END) AS Muted_0,
  COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 1 THEN topic_id END) AS Normal_1,
  COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 2 THEN topic_id END) AS Tracking_2,
  COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 3 THEN topic_id END) AS Watching_3
FROM 
  topic_users 
WHERE 
  topic_id IN (9831, 9572, 9424, 7567) -- Add your topic_ids here
GROUP BY
  topic_id, notification_level
1 Like