We recently launched a completely redesigned admin dashboard, and we’d love to hear what you think! In this topic, we’ll be running an asynchronous AMA where you’ll drop your questions, reactions, and other feedback, and we’ll answer them.
About the new admin dashboard
The redesigned dashboard brings your community’s most important metrics together in one place — traffic, engagement, signups, and more — with better charts, clearer defaults, and a layout built for the reporting you actually do.
Is it possible to use the new dashboard to set up the standard reports/DE queries you need to pull monthly and then use a workflow to automate that reporting?
That depends on what you mean by automate the reporting — if you mean automatically running the reports, they will run for the time frame selected on your dashboard (last 30 days by default) when the dashboard first loads.
If you mean automatically sending the reports somewhere, then no, the dashboard can’t do that yet. I think you could do that through Workflows directly, though, with the schedule, Data Explorer, and send personal message / send chat message nodes.
Is there a way to give this dashboard to community managers who are not admins? There is no way I’m going to start making people admins just so they can see this data.
Is there any chance of having a third staff role for this? I realize there are some privacy issues, but I’ve never understood why the concept of community manager and admin are thought to overlap.
Well this is interesting! I have never before come across a case where a community manager is not an admin (in my entire career). Can you give more context? What does that community manager actually do in their role and why aren’t they trusted?
Well, they are trusted to not steal our email list. So they have that kind of trust of course. But I wouldn’t want them to have access to settings or other admin powers. Just so they don’t break things.
This speaks to me of a real difference between community manager and forum admin.
I think that difference, and not seeing it, might be behind the pushback from forum admins against this new dashboard not showing the things a forum admin needs: the version, the pending updates, the disk space, the disk usage, the backups.
Exactly, or rather where an admin is not a community manager.
However, there may be use-cases where a community would like moderators to see the relevant engagement stats, but for the most part I doubt it would have any bearing on most moderators and what they do, not in our case anyway.
We tend to share this data where needed on group chats.
As for functionality, I would really like to be able to drill down into user agents, geographies, client info in the pageview chart. It is rather difficult to see where or what the view represents.
Sure, although it may not apply to this topic exactly. Our community is about as old as Discourse and since it is not commercial and not connected to a “product”, we don’t have the same sort of drive to get new users. But we do have a non-zero number of problematic users, and we have a more detailed code of conduct than would, say, a community built around an open source product.
Our community managers are mostly there to settle disputes between users and moderators, set policy, and generally ensure the well-being of the forum long term.
They have no need for access to the tools granted to a site admin. And to be quite honest, they probably wouldn’t even use the stats very much.
(This is where it may diverge from the topic at hand…) What they do need is access to staff areas for communication and review of staff actions. So they are all given moderator status and are told how to silence as much moderation “noise” as possible, as well as told to not touch the super powers that mods get.
Interesting—on the trust scale they fall below moderators yet they are responsible for mediating disputes between moderators and members? How does that work? (These are genuinely curious questions that are hard to pose without sounding confrontational in the absence of inflection.)
Oh, I completely understand your line of questions and do not take offense at all.
Have you ever heard the saying among soldiers, “I trust you with my life, but not my wallet or my wife”?
In this case, I trust the community managers with my life, but not the settings or the permission to do all the other things that admins could do intentionally or accidentally.
Also should be noted that these managers (like the admins and mods) are also regular members of the community, sometimes very active members.
Honestly, even as an admin, I sometimes wish I had to sudo in to get all of my admin powers. I’d love to be able to interact as just a regular member some times. It’s not a big deal. But for the community managers it would be really handy if they could just turn on their super powers when needed.
We are doing ok with the way things are now. But since you asked I’m happy to explain.
Previously, the statistics were updated ad hoc. Is it possible to increase the update frequency again?
I think it would be a great feature to make selected statistics, such as posts, new users, etc., available to the community. There used to be a plugin for this at Woltlab — many users are deeply attached to the community and are stats-savvy.
Thanks for this feedback; some site-level data is already visible on the /about page under the Site Activity section — perhaps this would be a good place to point your community for these sorts of details?
No, that’s not what I mean. The dashboard now shows various statistics, but some of them are not updated for me. For example, if I see posts on the dashboard, it shows 17 posts for today. When I click on the statistic, I see that 26 posts have already been written. This means that the dashboard does not update immediately, but feels like it only updates once an hour (?).
Yes, my members are already looking there. But the ability to create a public statistics page like the dashboard would be a great feature in my opinion.
