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.
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?
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:
If more ideas pop in I’ll be sure to add them.
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.
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?
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:
With the option to exclude staff from those counts.
I think that’s a good enough start.
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'
Is that different to the one in the /about statistics?
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. 
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
similar to the daily posts graph,
number of daily chat messages will be good enough in dashboard.
like this…
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 
It’s been awhile since anyone chimed in here but it would be very handy to have at least one report about chat activity.
Right now there’s no way to understand what engagement for the feature looks like. For channels you can have some kind of qualitative idea of what usage is like but DMs are a total black box. The chart @fbpbdmin posted above would be great but my wish list is:
