I have the opportunity to work with a few social media business analysts to make recommendations on our community. However, this requires that they have access to more than the out-of-box excel data spreadsheets that I’m able to generate as the site’s admin.
The analysts are asking for aggregate, raw data of posts, handles, and all the data related to who posts something, where they came from, how long they stayed, who reacted to their post, etc. Is there a way in discourse to make this data available to analysts? I suspect it would be similar to the same datasets I would need if I were migrating the community to another platform.
Does Discourse provide this dataset, or is this something individuals need to do through the API. Unfortunately, I am not a programmer, so unless the API configuration were a simple GUI, I would be at a loss.
Hoping that someone can help set me in the direction of getting access to the raw data so that I can give it to analysts teams.
You can use the Data Explorer plugin, create the queries to pull the necessary data and give access to them to your analysts. With the Data explorer you can pull data generated in your forum, and regulating access to this data is possible through groups.
Thank you for the response. I don’t think I can use this option. It seems that plugin requires a self-hosted standard installation . We only support the standard method of install here, so these instructions assume you have a standard install.
Our instance of discourse is hosted.
Is there another way that I could run queries on our community data without installing a plugin? Does Discourse provide this service?
Looking at your site code, I think you may have the data explorer already? If you’re hosted with Discourse on the Business or Enterprise plan the data explorer is included.
If it’s not already enabled, you should be able to do that from this setting:
