I too would love to have this functionality. I was talking with @eviltrout about this earlier today. The Admin console stats are pretty close, but it’s not possible to time-shift, so to speak.
In my case, what I think would be useful is to:
- For all categories and by category,
- For a named period of time, list the number of new topics
- For a named period of time, list the number of new posts (meaning both new topics and replies)
- For a named period of time, list the number of new user registrations
- Be able to compare any of the named periods above to a different named period of time
I could see where this could be made pretty easy for common scenarios, like “last month over previous month” and “last quarter over previous quarter”, though the generic case is defining a date range.
Another thing, covered in the “Daily Active Users” topic by @BCHK, would be the ability to see number of visits to a given category. Per that topic, the recommendation is Google Analytics. I’ll post over on that topic too, as I am curious if that is the best approach currently.