Add "All" timeframe to dashboard

I definitely think All is more useful and meaningful than today - `today’s stats won’t really mean anything unless you look at them around the same time every day…

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All is a boring stat – it’s a preening, vanity metric of very little utility or relevance to community health. What you really care about in terms of health is velocity and change. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you are 58 years old, what matters is if you are a healthy 58 year old :wink: … and if you aren’t, how do you get healthy?

Anyway the /all stats are available on /about … so look there

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I disagree Jeff - they are of huge relevance to community health. Community members love seeing how the forum is doing year on year. These kind of stats are incredibly useful for boosting morale, and showing the community all their hard work has been paying off (as well as, yes, demonstrating the popularity of the forum - or in many cases like ours - an indication of how the topic of the forum is doing).

It’s not great having to hunt around for stats - ideally stats intended for community managers should be where you would expect to find them (in this case that’s the stats page - i.e the dashboard).

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That sounds like “last year” to me, which is indeed supported. What we’re discussing is the value of “all time”.

You may notice that google no longer shows the total count of webpages they have indexed, either… a similar “all time” metric that doesn’t matter.

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All time is incredibly useful too Jeff. I’ll PM you the link to how we use them (or add you to the PM I sent Sarah)…

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I gotta agree with Jeff on this. I wouldn’t encourage any CMs to report on All. It’s not indicative of health.

That said, if you choose to you can - that data is still available, it just doesn’t need to take up space on the primary dashboard.

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All time (totals) are stats that stakeholders (like me as the site owner) will want to keep tabs on. Peculiar to see them absent in the new dashboard.

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It’s great having them - and as many of them as possible - so that we can choose which ones to share with our users (the specifics will depend on the type of forum and its users - different stats will matter in different spaces).

Here’s an excerpt from our annual update - it’s posts like these that boost morale and let users know their hard work makes a difference to the forum. Something I would say is very important for community health.

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Sam, I would never expect you to make changes ‘immediately’ so please don’t think I (/we) are demanding you make changes instantly. I’m sure we all realise you all have a lot on your plate.

I just hope our conversation will show that these kinds of stats matter, and matter pretty significantly. I’ve actually been so impressed with the Discourse stats that I was even thinking about removing Google Analytics.

That sounds like a great place to start :slight_smile:

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Visual mockups are 1000x better than words in this department, wack open chrome dev tools and amend the report so it looks like what you want then you can make a case for a change …

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No need for mockups. Here’s a screenshot from the dashboard we’ve all been happily using for many years, which includes the “all” column:

I’d agree on needing to “make a case for change”

You are not going to get Topics and Posts lines back anyway, hence you need to rethink this in the context of the new dashboard. I am strongly against duplicating lines that exist in charts. Very strongly against.

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Yeah, but this is my point here, you will not get them for 2 of the most important “all time” things… topics and posts, even if we cave in and give it for the other stats.

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Because you already have the numbers on the chart, you are just missing 1 all time number

I disagree on this, the dashboard is here to make you see the most relevant “recent” data, not a place for “ALL THE DATA”.

So it’s a tradeoff, ATM we decided that “ALL” was not a data you would need on a daily basis and preferred to remove it from the dashboard so we have more space for other data and reduce the noise.

I would also like to add, that writing plugins to display any table or chart you would want to see on this page is going to be very easy.

Finally, I see this argument a lot lately: “it has been like this for ages”. It’s not a valid thing to me in any way, I can understand that sometimes we remove/break things that people used, but this simple fact is not always enough to make it a valid feature. And I still have to read a valid use of this “ALL metric”, the mail linked before is not a valid use case to me, as it shows you will need this value very rarely.

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  • I would like all time stats on the dashboard
  • I don’t want/need all time stats on the dashboard
  • I don’t mind either way
  • Other (please comment)

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Poll driven development is not going to cut it :relaxed:

I think people who need all stats all the time are going to need to run a plugin and in dashboard v3 can just customize all the panels as they see fit. The wall of stats is not going to come back, it really turned people away from the dashboard. And @codinghorror already mentioned that we are keeping old dashboard for the next 12 months transition.

So you need to make a pretty strong argument here with screenshots that “All” is always needed, and which “alls” are always needed.

I am not convinced here that you need regular and constant access to these numbers, you can get to them all with one more click for the next year.

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Are you saying that at some point the dashboard will be “widget able” making it customizable? If so, I think this is great news :yey:

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It is already designed with that in mind, swapping a graph around now it as simple as editing a couple of lines, longer term it will be data driven.

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