Exploring Discourse Data Explorer on my Sandbox

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AI-generated summary

The discussion Exploring Discourse Data Explorer on my Sandbox centers around TedJohnson seeking suggestions on how to explore the Discourse Data Explorer feature on their sandbox site with minimal content. pfaffman reassures that there’s no need to fear experimenting with Data Explorer since it can’t alter any data. TedJohnson expresses interest in common use cases for Data Explorer, such as querying user interactions and post frequencies, and shares a workaround they used on an SMF site to achieve similar functionality. Canapin suggests using the rake dev:populate command to populate the instance with dummy content, noting it’s not suitable for production instances.

1

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?

2

There is no reason to have fear since data explorer can’t change anything.

It’s useful for seeing things you need to know about your site. If you don’t have a site with data, what are you looking for?

3

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”

Set_Search_Parameters
Set_Search_Parameters390×248 15.1 KB

4

There’s the rake dev:populate command that populates the instance with dummy content, but I think it can’t be run in a production instance.

edit: that should do the trick I think?