Good question. I’m interested in common use cases. If I were to administer a larger site, with lots of data, what would be the kinds of things I would use Data Explorer for?
I’m a non-Admin on an SMF site with 15+ years of data, and there have been numerous times that I have wanted query data, such as:
- How many times has USER1 commented on a post started by USER2 in CATEGORY
- How many new posts have there been in CATEGORY per month between DATE1 and DATE2
Want to see something funny? Here is a workaround I did in SMF to find all of topics I started in a particular board for a date range. SMF doesn’t really allow users to do that, so I had to get creative.
Summary
- I’m looking for any text in the subject that isn’t a reply, so
-"Re:" - SMF doesn’t allow wildcards and won’t allow you to search for an empty text, and it won’t allow you to search only for exclusions. So I search for a nonsense word “runkerflifying” – a word that won’t appear in any posts – and I also exclude “runkerflifying”
