tknospdr reported that posts in private topics aren’t appearing in the dashboard’s Posts Created report, despite recent activity. Moin identified the cause: the Private Topics plugin excludes such posts from public post counts, as the report only tracks public posts as defined in Discourse core. tknospdr expressed concern since their support forum — which must remain private — is the only category they need stats for. Moin suggested using Data Explorer with a custom query to retrieve the missing data, which tknospdr confirmed worked after tweaking. They also proposed building dedicated ticketing metrics (e.g., time to first response, time to resolution), noting Discourse’s growing use as a ticketing system. Moin pointed to existing reports and queries for time-to-response and solved-topic stats, though some may need updating. tobiaseigen moved the topic to #data-reporting and agreed private posts should appear in reports — ideally with filters to toggle public/private/both — praising Moin for diagnosing the plugin’s role.
I’m trying to figure out why some reports that should have data points on them are blank.
If you look at this screenshot, you can see that I just created a new topic and there is a post under it:
And if you look at the report for posts, it says there haven’t been any since Aug 14th, that’s not right. There have been plenty, including the one I just made 40 minutes ago to test with.
How do I troubleshoot this?
Do you use any plugins that might change something about these topics or posts?
Something like Private Topics Plugin
The system can still see them. But the plugin changes the code that defines what counts as a public post.
The report counts public posts
And the plugin changes that definition
If private topics is enabled and the post is in a category where the plugin is enabled, it’s excluded, so it’s not counted
Crap, that’s the antithesis of what I need.
The only category that my boss cares about statistics for is our support forum, and that needs to be private for ticket segregation.
Is there any way to get stats on those posts?
Data explorer should work to get the data. In this topic is the query which returns the post count per date like the dashboard report
I think it won’t be affected by Private Topics, so it could work for you without changing anything.
That got me most of the way there, thanks.
I requested some additional parameters on that page to dial the query in more.
Seems like there’s enough people using Discourse as a ticketing system that it would be worthwhile to build a stats page to track things like time to first post after new topic created, and total elapsed time till topics are marked solved etc to better cover this use case.
There is an admin report for “time to first response”.
And there are also lots of other queries in #data-reporting
Topics stats of Solved/Unsolved topics, inc. 'time to solution' is one you might be interested in. But I think it needs an update to reflect the changes on the solution plugin made in spring. Time to first response by group members and Solved Topic and Moderator Response Stats by Category might also be interesting.
ask.discourse.org is also very good at helping you to write queries that return the data you need
I shifted this topic across to #data-reporting so it can be pursued further here.
I agree that private posts should show up in reports, somewhere! It would be neat if the Posts report could have filters to show public or private posts, or both.
Well spotted that this has to do with the private topics plugin, @moin! 
