Hello! I would like our site to track as little information from our users as possible. In particular, from the admin/users/list/active page I would like to not have data about last seen, read topics, read posts, and reading time. Can I disable the collection of that data? pura vida.

The data isn’t collected directly. Those numbers are inferred from discourse features such as where you last read to in a topic. If discourse doesn’t track what you read and how far you got through topics the user experience would be significantly degraded. You can hide them using css, or remove them from the UI entirely by writing a plugin.

AFAIK it’s calculated from your read history rather than directly recorded. I could be wrong though.

oh, interesting. So it calculates the time it takes to read a post, and then makes a somewhat accurate guess. I feel that’s the most invasive of all the numbers, so it might be good to explain it further in a tooltip or something.

Just a thought, but if there are fundamental features within discourse which you dislike have you considered alternate discussion platforms?

I love discourse. I have considered alternate discussion platforms, but I would like to stay on this one :slight_smile:

Disable user tracking

Product Support

elopio (Leo Arias) September 7, 2020, 5:02pm 3

Hum, right… What about reading time? What feature justifies that one?

Also, I feel like it might be possible to obfuscate “last seen” in the database, but I might be missing something that requiries it.

Topic		Replies	Views
Is there an explanation on how Discourse tracks posts read, and other information? Data & reporting	1	1314	February 15, 2024
Understanding stats for 'topic views', 'posts read', and 'reading time' Using Discourse reference	1	3652	June 19, 2024
How does post tracking work in Discourse Development dev-news	4	4341	April 24, 2019
Include reading time in the site stats Feature	4	1949	September 18, 2014
How is read time calculated? Product Support	1	2394	November 15, 2019

Disable user tracking

Related topics