# Community Network Visualisation

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/community-network-visualisation/184189
**Category:** Plugin
**Created:** [March 23, 2021, 2:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/community-network-visualisation/184189 "2021-03-23T14:57:41Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

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### Author: ![merefield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/merefield/32/176214_2.png) [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [March 23, 2021, 2:57pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/community-network-visualisation/184189/1 "2021-03-23T14:57:41Z")

</div>

**Summary** : A user network visualisation

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/0/4/f/04f1477467cccf7cb522d9654a777e4f9fd6f399.jpeg)

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/7/7/77581dc9750d14bc8e1bde60f524901b2523089b.png)

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/9/3/934a0ab4ad0659aaf39cc7d7ab24b899e856c832.png)

🔗 **GitHub** : `https://github.com/merefield/discourse-user-network-vis`[GitHub - merefield/discourse-user-network-vis: A plugin that creates a User Network Visualisation to show social links between users · GitHub](https://github.com/merefield/discourse-user-network-vis)

➡ **Install** : Follow the [plugin installation guide](https://meta.discourse.org/t/install-a-plugin/19157).

### Features

Presents your community as a network visualisation

Accessed via a menu item added automatically (can be turned off):

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/4X/8/e/3/8e3f0205b1147e8a7cba7e87b3c058bfb470eb58.png)

Get to it by hitting `User Network` on the Sidebar/Dropdown menu or navigating to `yoursite.com/usernetworkvis` - NB you have to be logged in as a registered user to see the vis.

- the nodes represent users.

- the links represent interactions on your forum - the more interactions, the thicker the line

- _ **Hover** _ over a user to isolate them and their connections visually

- _ **Click** _ on a node to navigate to their Summary profile.

- _ **Drag** _ nodes around and watch the show 🎲

- _ **Zoom** _ the entire view with the mouse wheel.

⚠ Trust levels are currently exposed as different colours. If you don’t want this, set the same colour several times. I may find another criterium to set colour, but this was the most obvious by far as very generic ⚠

To refresh data, Trigger the job. This may be necessary after a settings change (I’ve marked those that require it):

Go to: `https://your.site/sidekiq/scheduler` and find this one:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/f/1/f137b23817f7fb36178ab4af84d49a0981ca60a4.png)

Otherwise this runs every hour.

⚠ if you have 10,000’s of users, this job may run LONG and take up resources. Seems to work ok on a 5,000 account site running on a 2 Core 2GB VPS taking about 30 seconds. The SQL is necessarily BRUTAL ⚠

### Interested in the data?

My intention with this was just to paint a picture.

If you want to see the data, just go to `yoursite.com/usernetworkvis.json`

In any case, in individual cases, you can see much of this data on each users summary page by clicking on a node (Most replied to, Most liked/liked by). I therefore consider it semi-public information.

### Configuration

Settings … so … many … settings:

If you have a large site with lots of people on it, you are going to find the diagram very noisy. Consider upping `minimum trust level` and there is now an option to remove people not seen for x years:

 ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/6/5/65c56d17e9d82ff5bfba0b00d8035d6b1ded09f2.png)

### TODO

- The menu item has localisation support, but if no-one has yet PR’d your localisation yet, please consider doing so or otherwise it will remain a key code …

## Creds

The visualisation is based on [the awesome d3 library](https://d3js.org/)

## Similar projects

If you like this you might also like:

- [Word Cloud plugin](https://meta.discourse.org/t/word-cloud-plugin/210169)
- [Discourse Tag Cloud](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-tag-cloud/218014)

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