Plugin: Admin statistics digest

Feature
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I’ve never been good at tracking statistics. I’m not disciplined enough to observe patterns and try to discern ongoing trends. Give me a good infographic though (aka Stats for Dummies) and I’ll eat that stuff up like it’s :taco: Tuesday.

Imagine every month, you receive an email from Discourse that tells you:

  • You have x more/less visitors than last month. (show overlapping graphs).

  • You have x more/less topics than last month (show overlapping graphs)

  • X topics posted in the last 30 days have no replies. That’s y% of all new topics this month, which is a z% increase/decrease from last month.
    [Click here to view all topics with no replies.]

  • These users joined some time in the past 60-30 days, and look how well they’re doing! (highlight of newly registered users that have stayed active)

  • These are your top non-staff users of the month

  • These formerly very active users are not so active any more. (especially if I’m losing a TL3 user, let me know!)

  • The 5 most active responders in the support category were: …

  • Your three most active categories are: Cats (32%), Dogs (15%) and Ferrets (5%)

  • Your retention rate for this month: What would be a good query here?

  • Most popular topics & posts this month (essentially a monthly version of the weekly digest, except more data-heavy, showing shorts lists of most liked, most viewed, most replied to etc.)

Most of these might also benefit from a “You have x more/less something than the average of the past year”

If we wanted to get real fancy (best suited for a 2nd iteration) there could even be a basic checklist interface for this, where the admin could check whichever items they wanted reporting on. E.g. if you really don’t care about your most active categories, you’d just exclude that from the report.

More stat ideas welcome!

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Be careful as I feel these two scenarios should be mostly automated, that is, the system should automatically send a nicely written email to them in either case. I’d favor the new users first, though, as an attaboy goes a long way…

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Well, the active users should already be receiving a variety of attaboy badges, so I don’t really see the need for another layer of automated praise added onto that.

As for the “drop-outs”, some last resort automated outreach would indeed be cool here. I still think that’s just two sides of the same coin though. As an admin, I really want to know about these users as well. Seeing as I’m human, I can check a dropout’s post history and see that their last post says “sure, I’ll send that PR in a jiffy, just gotta talk to my gf real quick and figure out what she meant by “we need to talk” lolz” and have a much better idea than an algorithm ever could of what and when (if at all) to say anything.

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Not exactly; it is a rather different thing to get a personalized email saying how awesome you are, versus the same badges everyone else gets.

Unless you want to propose a “Best New User, June 2016” badge…

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This has been completed by @saiqulhaq:

1 Like