Chat activity in Community health / Reports data

Hi there,

How do “Chat Channels” and “Personal chat” feed into Community Health / Reports data?

As far as I’m aware they don’t. Are there plans to enhance/modify the Community Health dashboard to take into account things happening in chat?

Thanks for your advice and help.

8 Likes

There aren’t any existing reports for chat usage, but I agree this is something we’ll need to add in the not too distant future. In the meantime, some data explorer queries might be able to help find what you need.

What kind of information about chat usage would you find particularly helpful to have quicker access to?

3 Likes

Hi @mcwumbly, thanks for your reply.

I think it’s one of those situations where a tool gives you the data and then you go, “Ah, that’s handy!” as opposed to a huge desire for stats.

Yet perhaps it would be interesting to see the following:

  • Volume of channel chat over various timeframes (a count)
  • Volume of Personal chat (a count)
  • Total chat reactions across all chat channels and on specific chat channels
  • Number of topics referenced
  • Count of chat turned into topic discussions
  • Count of first time chat users
  • Chat run streaks e.g. this person chats at least 4 days of the week
  • League tables of user chat activity

If more ideas pop in I’ll be sure to add them.

3 Likes

Hi @mcwumbly,

Is there an update on the likelihood of adding metrics for chat activity?

We’re in the process of overhauling our categories. We’ll end up simplifying the categories and encouraging more activity on chat channels. We currently capture interactions between members based on new topic, new post, new private message and likes.

So we might see a drop in those numbers as things shift towards chat. Yet we’d still like to capture data related to interactions via the chat channels and personal chat as well as categories.

3 Likes

No update yet, but what I think makes sense to try out here is to work on defining some data explorer queries first as a means to prototype the kind of metrics you’re looking for. Happy to help do that here with you as a first step.

I hear that “interactions between members” is the kind of thing you’re most interested in measuring. Does that hold true for chat? What kinds of things would you hope to see count as interactions within chat?

6 Likes

Thanks, @mcwumbly.

Absolutely.

Data explorer queries for the following would be handy. I’ll start super high level. All by date range from and to:

  1. Total count of messages sent in all public channels
  2. Total count of personal chat messages sent
  3. Total count of chat reactions

With the option to exclude staff from those counts.

I think that’s a good enough start.

1 Like

Mark in our team has set up this query. It returns the count of chat messages sent in the last 30 days. Thought it would be useful to share if anyone else is interested and stumbles across this post.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM chat_messages WHERE created_at >= CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - INTERVAL '30 days'

1 Like

Is that different to the one in the /about statistics?

2 Likes

Oh, well there you go. I did not know those stats were available on the /about page. Thanks for signposting, @JammyDodger.

I’ll share that with my team. :slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes

We use this one in my community to see the most active users in the last 30 days.

SELECT 
u.username,
COUNT(c.*) AS cnt
FROM 
chat_messages AS c
LEFT JOIN users AS u ON c.user_id = u.id
WHERE c.created_at >= CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - INTERVAL '30 days'
GROUP BY u.username
ORDER BY cnt DESC
3 Likes

similar to the daily posts graph,
number of daily chat messages will be good enough in dashboard.
like this…

3 Likes

wonder if there is on the plan, nice to have the chat activity chart…

on our forum, more activities are in the chat room, more than posting activities :slight_smile:

1 Like