I have Discourse Data Explorer installed on my Discourse sandbox, but I don’t have a lot of content on the site yet. I’m looking for some suggestions on how to play around with Data Explorer…
On a site with minimum content, or
Import a bunch of dummy content to make it interesting
I’m sure importing dummy content would be an interesting exercise in its own right.
Any thoughts on how best to learn Data Explorer on a Discourse instance where I can be fearless?
Good question. I’m interested in common use cases. If I were to administer a larger site, with lots of data, what would be the kinds of things I would use Data Explorer for?
I’m a non-Admin on an SMF site with 15+ years of data, and there have been numerous times that I have wanted query data, such as:
How many times has USER1 commented on a post started by USER2 in CATEGORY
How many new posts have there been in CATEGORY per month between DATE1 and DATE2
Want to see something funny? Here is a workaround I did in SMF to find all of topics I started in a particular board for a date range. SMF doesn’t really allow users to do that, so I had to get creative.
Summary
I’m looking for any text in the subject that isn’t a reply, so -"Re:"
SMF doesn’t allow wildcards and won’t allow you to search for an empty text, and it won’t allow you to search only for exclusions. So I search for a nonsense word “runkerflifying” – a word that won’t appear in any posts – and I also exclude “runkerflifying”