The discussion revolves around downloading a user database and sorting by time viewed in Discourse. BaneWilliams wants to analyze user engagement, comparing lurkers to active users, and is concerned about capturing data from logged-in users. HAWK notes that Discourse doesn’t track anonymous users granularly but suggests using Google Analytics. BaneWilliams clarifies that users will be logged in via SSO, reducing the issue of anonymous tracking. maiki recommends the Data Explorer plugin as a way to analyze user data without manually downloading the database.
I notice that Discourse tracks posts viewed and time viewed.
We are looking to use Discourse as a product support community, where you are given an account on product registration, with SSO to eliminate the pesky registration step
I’d really like to capture lurker data to see if a lurker performs better than someone who has never viewed the forum, and also compare them against active forum users.
While I expect this to be a lot of manual work on my behalf initially, I’d still like to capture that if I can. Is that possible?
Discourse doesn’t collect data from anonymous (not logged in) users in a granular way but you can plug in your Google Analytics UA code and track their movement through your site.
From what I am understanding of our implementation, users will automatically be logged on. So this part shouldn’t be a problem, since any triallist will automatically have credentials and authentication.
Of course this will not work if they are finding the community through non-standard avenues (google search, etc) but the links we control to the community automatically log you in.
