The discussion revolves around whether Discourse should reveal users’ rankings in its global instance database, which collects stats during version pings. meglio expresses interest in knowing their position, noting that such data is currently private, while acknowledging that scores could be calculated based on user count, topics, posts, and average activity. sam counters that competing with others is less meaningful than self-improvement and growing one’s own community, and that Discourse already provides useful stats for internal tracking. meglio insists competition is human nature. ColdSun warns that any public metric would be gamed via fake accounts or posts, and that self-improvement over time is more valuable. meglio disagrees but acknowledges the sensitivity of public data. erlend_sh suggests such data might become available as Discourse evolves toward a Discourse Hub, but only with user opt-in due to privacy concerns. alefattorini questions how such rankings would be measured. tobiaseigen asks what data Discourse actually collects. codinghorror clarifies that it’s essentially the same stats visible on /about, not significantly different from what Google Analytics might show. The consensus leans toward caution, privacy, and self-measurement over public rankings.
I know such a database is a piece of private information.
However, as the owner of my own Instance, I would be very interested in finding out my position in the global database that you, the Discourse, receive and collect when our instances ping your server for version updates.
This info could be shown in our admin panel and might be encouraging for the whole team of admins and mods!
There could be a total average score calculated by some secret formula, as well as separate scores for number of users, topics, messages, average daily activity etc.
Competing with others is not that interesting, instead compete with yourself.
Make sure that more users are getting engaged, the community is growing and becoming more interesting and useful. We provide you with lots of stats in the admin dashboard.
That is far more important that getting a #1 in some sort of global leaderboard.
No matter the metric used, it’d be gamed by someone else through fake accounts, fake posts or whatever else. Sure, the metrics may not be published, but there isn’t that many different variables that could be used.
Additionally, as Sam said, compete with yourself. Be it a weekly, monthly, or 6month basis, try to grow faster than the previous chunk. Not only will you strive for something, but you’ll actually gain something from ‘winning’.
Finally, to state that its in people’s nature to compete may be a bit presumptuous. Its quite possible that its simply social constructs that are incredibly pervasive.
More of this kind of info will probably be publicly available the closer we get to some concept of a Discourse Hub. But right now we don’t have a simple way of letting people opt-in/out of such lists, which is very important seeing as not all communities will want their data open to the public.
So, better to err on the side of caution while we figure out a good way to present this data without stepping on any toes.
If you’d like, feel free to start a “Share your data” topic and invite other admins to share their stats. That could be pretty interesting, and is also quite fitting around this time when many of us are starting a new calendar year. Just try to make it about something more interesting than “who’s got the highest numbers”.
