Discourse has introduced a redesigned Admin Dashboard aimed at answering the core question: How is my community doing? The new interface serves as a clear landing page for actionable insights, allowing admins to measure community health and demonstrate value to their organizations.
Key features include:
- Customization: Admins can toggle sections on or off and rearrange them via a configure button. A more flexible date/time selector with presets and custom options has also been added.
- Sections: The dashboard is organized around top community metrics. Highlights display key KPIs with explanatory tooltips. Site traffic retains traditional metrics while adding new ones such as direct traffic percentage, logged-in user ratio, session duration, and bounce rate (aligned with Google’s definition).
- Data Explorer Integration: Users can now create charts without writing SQL and pin them directly to the dashboard for quick access.
The update acknowledges that data may reveal negative trends, emphasizing that awareness is the first step toward improvement. The new dashboard is currently in beta, enabled by default for self-hosted, Pro, and Business plans, with other customers able to opt in via the upcoming changes system. Future improvements will include better crawler detection, smarter search term grouping, custom KPIs, and saved views for different stakeholders.
In response, Ed_S suggested adding a dedicated System section to the dashboard for easier visibility of server stats like version, pending updates, disk space, and backups.