Admin Reporting & Analysis: Incremental Changes

[chapoi]

We’re beginning a broader rework of the admin dashboard.
This first step focuses on making the Reporting & Analysis section clearer and easier to navigate.

In this topic, we’ll review the first incremental changes and share how you can start using this today.

What’s changed

Report grouping

A first step we are taking is to group the reports. We aim to group them by type of question they could answer. At the moment, these groupings are:

• Engagement
• Traffic
• Members
• Content & Health
• Moderation
• Security

Anything that doesn’t fit or new reports will go into a rest category (“other”).

The goal is to reduce cognitive load and make it easier to find the report you need without scanning a long, flat list.

Report cleanup

Over time, the reporting page accumulated more charts than most admins meaningfully use.

As part of this update, we’ve removed a set of reports from the main view.

Overview of legacy reports

• bookmarks
• likes
• moderator_warning_private_messages
• notify_moderators_private_messages
• notify_user_private_messages
• post_edits
• profile_views
• system_private_messages
• top_users_by_likes_received_from_inferior_trust_level
• top_users_by_likes_received_from_a_variety_of_people
• user_to_user_private_messages

For the moment, they are still available via direct link but hidden from the report page, and they will eventually be deprecated. (We’re happy to reconsider if there are strong use cases we’ve overlooked.)

For more granular or one-off analysis, they can alway be replicated via data explorer.

Navigation & Layout changes

We also streamlined the header section so it matches our more recent admin layout and frees up real estate by not repeating on every report page.

As you can see: more content above the fold.

The reports page is now decoupled from the dashboard.
Instead of rendering inside the dashboard view, it now lives at its own dedicated route (/admin/reports).

This removes duplicate routes and simplifies navigation as we move toward a more modular admin experience.

This is a first step in the larger dashboard rework and while this area behaves inconsistently now, it will improve in later iterations.

Turning on Reporting improvements in your community

For now, this is considered an experimental change! We’re welcoming your feedback, which will help us make improvements and roll this out further.

To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Reporting improvements item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:

What do you think?

Over to you: we’d love to hear what you think of this rework. Do the groupings make sense? How do you use our reporting?

This topic will be updated with further improvements to this area.

[hellekin]

Thank you for taking care of admins!

@chapoi

we’ve removed a set of reports from the main view.

Can these be published as data-explorer queries in Data & reporting, or will someone document how to use Discourse Prometheus for interested people?

@chapoi

Do the groupings make sense?

@chapoi

How do you use our reporting?

Honestly I think I’m going to use reporting more after the rework. Until now, I didn’t see much interest in exploring this area, especially because of its lack of structure, so… good work!

[Moin]

@hellekin

Can these be published as data-explorer queries in Data & reporting

They are. You can currently still find them with the dashboard-sql tag, and they are linked in Admin dashboard report reference guide

For future reference as they are likely to be removed from these soon:

report	topic
bookmarks	Dashboard Report - Bookmarks
likes	Dashboard Report - Likes
moderator_warning_private_messages	Dashboard Report - Moderator Warnings
notify_moderators_private_messages	Dashboard Report - Notify Moderators
notify_user_private_messages	Dashboard Report - Notify User
post_edits	Dashboard Report - Post Edits
profile_views	Dashboard Report - User Profile Views
system_private_messages	Dashboard Report - System
top_users_by_likes_received_from_inferior_trust_level	Dashboard Report - Top Users by Likes Received from a User with a Lower Trust Level
top_users_by_likes_received_from_a_variety_of_people	Dashboard Report - Top Users by Likes Received From a Variety of People
user_to_user_private_messages	Dashboard Report - User-to-User

[gormus (Osman Görmüş)]

Feature request:

Would you consider moving the reports a non-admin path, and managing access via a new ..._allowed_groups setting? :))

  access_reports_allowed_groups:
    default: "1|2" # auto groups admins, moderators
    mandatory_values: "1|2" # auto group admins, moderators
    type: group_list
    allow_any: false

[Moin]

Is the warning within the table on my dashboard an expected result?

[Moin]

What determines the order in which the plugin reports are shown? The order seems to change based on my interface language, but it’s not alphabetical.

English	German
solved	solved
documentation categories	AI
AI	user notes
Reactions	Calendar
User notes	documentation categories
Calendar	Reactions

[chapoi]

At the moment thats not on the table at all. We feel reports are a very specific admin area.

Do you have a specific usecase in mind?

@Moin

What determines the order in which the plugin reports are shown?

Haha, so okay, I think we did something very special here

It seems they are ordered alphabetically, based on the name of the first report in the group…

So for example in English I have:

While I do think there is a certain quirky charm to it, we’ll get it… sorted

[gormus (Osman Görmüş)]

@chapoi

At the moment thats not on the table at all. We feel reports are a very specific admin area.

Do you have a specific usecase in mind?

I have received certain interests in some of the reports from the leadership who are not necessarily technical and should not have the admin or moderator role just to access the reports.

I could of course re-create the reports using the Data Explorer, and share those reports with them too. But on the downside;

• I need to maintain those data explorer reports as they are updated in the core
• Graphs and charts are only available in the Reports, not in the Data Explorer reports (unless I missed something)
• The Reports UI is less admin-y (more user-friendly) than the data explorer reports UI

I’d even take it one step further and ask for enabling Reports reports for selected groups, just like the data explorer reports do

Yet again, this whole ask would have been a “nice to have” feature, not a “must have” : ))

[chapoi]

Thanks for expanding on it – it’s an interesting usecase.

I don’t know how much overhead something like this would bring; maybe it’s minimal. I’ll bring it up internally when discussing this project!

[chapoi]

@chapoi

While I do think there is a certain quirky charm to it, we’ll get it… sorted

This is now done – should be alphabetical, and change with the user interface language.

[Zanbabe (Suzanne)]

I use the top_users_by_likes_received_from_a_variety_of_people to determine one of our end-of-year awards. Would like to still have access to that report for that reason.

I have used a few of the other ones that are going to be deprecated as well. Echo the desire to still have access in some way. … Would actually be nicer to just have a menu of reports and have the ability to choose which ones we want on our dashboard, including custom ones.

[chapoi]

@Zanbabe

top_users_by_likes_received_from_a_variety_of_people

Can you explain why the total liked wouldnt suffice? Is that to avoid the awards can be gamed by intensive liking between a small group?

[ToddZ]

@chapoi

we’ve removed a set of reports from the main view
…
and they will eventually be deprecated

I’m not protesting - just curious: why remove these instead of tucking them under a collapsed heading or something. Will they require maintenance that’s not worth it?

[Zanbabe (Suzanne)]

Yeah. We have a small group that games the system extensively, although they are also helpful in other ways, so we’re not going to kick them off or anything. They tend to dominate the awards… we do give awards for the straight numbers as well, but want to diversify and give awards (and draw attention to) people who are behaving better.

The more user reports I have that show people doing things that we want to motivate, the better.

Off topic for this conversation, but I also wish we could adjust points more specifically. I don’t want to turn them off completely in the fun areas of my site and disincentivize the people that are participating there, but I would love to give MORE points in certain categories, rather than just turning points on or off.

[chapoi]

@ToddZ

I’m not protesting - just curious:

Fair question.

@ToddZ

Will they require maintenance that’s not worth it?

In software, as a golden rule, everything requires maintenance! The specific reports maybe not so much though, so we could keep them around.

To answer your main question:

@ToddZ

hy remove these instead of tucking them under a collapsed heading or something

Because seeing if any complaints show up is the easiest way to find out if something is valuable or not

And in design, and to me personally, the concept of having a “extra” category that’s just shoved underneath come collapsible heading is a sign that the surrounding features aren’t designed well. Part of good design is also daring to prune away things.