The admin dashboard has a new design that puts your most important community signals — traffic, search health, engagement, and support — front and center, with a customizable reports section, date range controls, and category-level controls.
In this topic, we’ll review the major changes and share how you can start using this today.
What’s changed
The new dashboard was designed to help you understand your community’s health and value. Let’s walk through the dashboard’s content and capabilities.
At the top of the dashboard, you can customize the date range and use the Configure button to manage the ordering and visibility of dashboard sections.
Note: For communities with lots of traffic, we recommend limiting the dashboard to no more than 6 months of data at a time. Larger time periods may impact the dashboard’s performance. We’re working to improve this!
Highlights shows high-level community health KPIs for the selected time period: new signups, DAU/MAU ratio, new contributors, and if your community uses support categories, the number of accepted solutions.
Site Traffic surfaces how people are finding and using your community, including details about session duration, bounce rate, and where traffic comes from (i.e. the top referrers and top countries).
Notes:
- You may notice pageview counts look slightly higher after enabling the redesigned dashboard. This is expected — the new dashboard records pageviews more reliably, capturing some visits that the previous method could miss. Your actual traffic hasn’t changed; the numbers are just more accurate.
- Our expanded referrer tracking is a recent addition to Discourse, so it won’t be available if you look at time periods beyond a month or so ago.
Reports is a customizable section where you can pin the reports that matter most to your community. This includes Data Explorer queries, including your own custom queries, for Business+ customers.
Engagement shows how actively members are participating in your community. This section includes a trust level pipeline, which tracks how members are growing as they participate more and more, details on which users are posting, and a breakdown of activity by category for the most active categories in your community (which you can also customize to show the categories of your choice).
Search shows total search volume and no-result rate for the selected period, a list of trending search terms, and a list of search terms where users click none of the results — which indicates a content gap.
For sites with at least one support category, the Support section shows resolution rate, staff involvement, and average first-reply time, along with breakdowns of the topic outcome, information about who is answering, and response time distributions.
Turning on dashboard improvements in your community
To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Dashboard 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 new feature. What do you like and dislike; what is working well, and what could be improved?
Original post content
We are in the midst of significant improvements to the admin dashboard that will make it easier to access and interpret data about your community’s health and value. In this topic, we’ll share what we’re working on so you can see where we are headed!
For now, this is considered a highly experimental change! We are very much in the midst of development, so please expect to see some rough edges — particularly around performance — and lots of evolution in the coming weeks. We are doing dedicated testing with a limited group of customers which is informing most of the work at this time.
What’s changing
We are updating the dashboard to serve as a hub for admins who want at-a-glance insights about the health and value of their community. At the moment, the dashboard is composed of four sections:
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Highlights, where admins can view important key performance indicators like signups, stickiness, and accepted solutions.
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Reports, where admins can pin the standard reports or Data Explorer queries (including custom queries!) that are most important in your community.
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Site Traffic, which lets you know who is coming to your community and where they’re coming from. (Note that referrer information will not be backfilled.)
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Engagement, which digs into who is joining and participating in the community and which areas of the community are most active.
We expect to add more sections soon to explore Support and Search data.
Previewing the redesigned dashboard in your community
If you’d like to check in our progress so far, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the dashboard improvements item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:
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