Plugin: Monthly automated community report

What if every month, we could all be reminded of what we did as a community over the last 30 days. :heart_exclamation:

This type of content has historically been curated manually by community managers:


I wanted to do one of these for the year 2016, but other tasks kept climbing higher up on the priority ladder. Besides, it’s pretty tedious, unrewarding work, since >90% of it can be automated. So today I had a wee think about what such an automated report might look like:

Basic stats

  • How many topics & posts were created?
  • How many different people participated in conversations?
  • How many new users signed up?
  • Were categories created/destroyed/changed?

:notepad_spiral: I don’t think a comparison to last month would be necessary. The fact that we posted 10 more/fewer topics this month doesn’t really mean anything, but users might inclined to add meaning to it regardless, and we wouldn’t want that.

Content highlights

  • New articles added to howto this month
  • Most liked replies in support

Top snapshot

:notepad_spiral: Maybe it could be fun to treat this almost like a time capsule. No need to feature individual topics. Just do this:

As of today, {date}, these are the Top 10 topics you’ll find in /top/monthly:

  • Displaying sub-categories in boxes
  • Telegram Notifications Plugin
  • Weekly or monthly “best new user” badge
  • (…)

Badge highlights

  • “Helpdesk” was awarded to: Tom, Julia, Hannah (…)
  • “Best new user” was awarded to (…)
  • “Contributor” was awarded to (…)

:notepad_spiral: This section was my primary motivation for finally suggesting such a automated report. When we’ve awarded something like Helpdesk, Bug Reporter or Contributor to one of our members, I want to know about it. And those members deserve some extra recognition for it. This report could act as that extra bit of applause for those members who’ve gained a badge that requires a considerable bit of time and effort.


Clearly there’s some overlap here with the admin stats report, but quite a few things need to change when we post stats publicly. The key difference is that we don’t want to do a lot of “rankings” in a public stats report. Again, this is because we don’t want to risk having users misunderstand the stats as a leaderboard. It’s not about that.

19 Likes

Sure! I would love to see this morph into a selling tool for our communities as in

LOOK how awesome your Discourse community is and all the COOL stuff it produced!

With the implied

… doesn’t that make you super glad you pay us $100 or $200 a month to host it?!

That we could use it on our own hosted communities is merely a bonus :wink:

7 Likes

With that in mind (but also for other obvious reasons) it would be great to design the plugin in such a way that it would allow admins to add text under each (?) element of the report, basically to make it easy to produce something along the lines of yearly update for Discourse. But it should, of course, work in full automatic mode too.

Not to forget: Most liked topic in praise :wink:

Love that, it would be super useful. Let us customize it with extra text and it’s ok for me.

Note that @simon has been cooking up something along these lines as a “year in review” fun stats report, and will have more to show soon. :partying_face:

11 Likes

posting so i can keep an eye on that new feature coming out :slight_smile:

We have a Discourse Yearly Review Plugin that could be used as the basis of a new plugin for creating a monthly report.

5 Likes