What if every month, we could all be reminded of what we did as a community over the last 30 days. 
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?
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
Top snapshot
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 (…)
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.
