I see you’re putting a lot of effort into the shiny admin dashboard which is great . One thing which was mentioned in a discussion recently purged away from alpha feedback - why not make these graphs and metrics available to the community too?
I’m thinking of the many contributors with higher trust level here, who may see indicators for a well-grown community, not essentially administrators only. Maybe have such statistics only available for a specific trust level configured in site settings. This allows to disable this entirely for sites which don’t like their data that exposed. Still I do believe that such graphs and metrics are great for the public domain.
This likely would require more than just caching the metrics and graphs, maybe a good idea to render the charts into static PNG on an hourly basis. This could prevent high loads on the server when many users click “about” or attempt to play around with DDOS in a curl script.
This is not an immediate request, first off the admin dashboard should be finished with 2.1. It would be great though if development and code would be prepared for such a thing on the long run
We had that at Stack Exchange (mods could see site stats) and honestly it didn’t do much. Based on that experience, I don’t think it’s worth the considerable risk and downside of exposing the dashboard.
You’d be better off focusing on improvements to the /about page stats which are public to everyone. As in, what value do people get out of that information right now?
I’m not really used to Stack Exchange and how its community is organized and moderated. I’d imagine that it is huge compared to a niche thing with monitoring related topics only.
As for “my” communities, I like public stats and transparency of the things we achieve. Such numbers allow users to see whether communities are healthy and active, and the one’s which are not. This is for example one of the factors I am telling people on whether they should use an open source project X compared to Y. “Choose upon community activity and responsiveness”.
GitHub contributor stats and the overall project view are pretty interesting to determine a project’s health for example. I see that in the same way for a community, and such a thing should not be “hidden” to admins resp. community managers imho.
The current stats are fine in the way they are publicly visible, I very much like that attempt. You don’t get that with Woltlab, their About page is boring. Still graphs in a dashboard are more “fancy” and put a different view on things. A number in a table doesn’t tell much, a graph can tell stories
Keys from the admin dashboard I would for example add:
time to answer
user visits
accepted solutions
One can link and share these stats, either be proud or tell others. Just an idea, maybe I’m thinking too open here. If it is too complicated to maintain or for performance reasons, I’m totally fine with numbers
. One thing which was mentioned in a discussion recently purged away from alpha feedback - why not make these graphs and metrics available to the community too?