A discussion about the Consolidated Pageviews graph on the Discourse dashboard led to suggestions for improvement. fhe proposed adding a toggle to hide crawlers and anonymous users, allowing for easier inspection of day-to-day changes in pageviews of logged-in users. joffreyjaffeux mentioned that similar functionality is being worked on for the dedicated report page and a PR is in progress to make arbitrary filters easier.
fhe suggested an alternative approach of toggle-cycling through different views by clicking on the graph. joffreyjaffeux expressed interest in exploring this idea.
fhe also suggested rearranging the bars to prioritize logged-in users, anonymous users, and crawlers. bartv agreed and suggested improving the color coding to give more visual weight to logged-in users. sam referenced Grafana as a possible inspiration for the changes.
codinghorror supported the idea of rearranging the bars, citing the importance of logged-in users as the base value. joffreyjaffeux implemented the change in a GitHub commit.
First of all, I love the new consolidated pageviews graph that is displayed on the dashboard starting with 2.2.0.beta9! I see even more room for improvement here, maybe it’s something specific to my community, but the crawlers are having their fair share of the overall pageviews:
This makes it difficult to visually inspect the day to day changes in, e.g., pageviews of logged in users.
My suggestion is to provide a toggle that hides crawlers and one that hides pageviews of anonymous users (adjusting the graph dimensions to the respective maximum).
This way, if pageviews of crawlers are hidden, the actual users would be more visible. If then also anonymous users are hidden, community health wrt. logged in users could be inspected more closely.
It will come in a future update, at least on the dedicated report page : /admin/reports/consolidated_page_views?start_date=2018-12-23&end_date=2019-01-23
Doing this on the chart itself would be very easy to do, but I think this is a lot of visual space, for something you will end up clicking rarely. But I totally support it on the standalone report page.
One option would be to toggle-cycle through the different views by clicking on the graph itself. Not sure if this is something you’re up to. Maybe it’s too non-obvious (is this even a word?) and would result in more support overhead.
I want to come back to this again and propose another change, which might be easier to realize:
What do you think about rearranging the different bars so that logged in users are at the bottom, anonymous users in the middle and crawlers on top? This would allow for a better understanding of the differences in traffic of real users.
And now that I look at the graph again after reading your suggestion, I realised that the color coding could be improved too: currently the web crawlers get the highest visual ‘weight’ and logged in users the lowest. This should be reversed (but maybe that will automatically happen once the order is changed?).
For inspiration I think grafana does a good job here so its a reasonable idea to emulate it.
In particular on /admin/reports/consolidated_page_views?start_date=2019-01-09&end_date=2019-02-09 you can display the label names and have them clickable, when bold they show when non bold they do not show the series.
One extra bit of interesting fancy grafana has is that you can use control as well which lets you select 2 out of 4.
I do think this is a good idea. Your “base” is logged in users, the next most valuable is anonymous real users, bots and crawlers least valuable of all. Value @j.jaffeux
And now that I look at the graph again after reading your suggestion, I realised that the color coding could be improved too: currently the web crawlers get the highest visual ‘weight’ and logged in users the lowest. This should be reversed (but maybe that will automatically happen once the order is changed?).
