Time tracking using Discourse?

[downey (Michael Downey)]

Hi folks. I’ve poked around as this topic has come up now and then over the years, but has anyone successfully found a way to use Discourse to log time/effort/money spent by people working on a project.

We have the assign plugin that is great to show who’s doing what, but I don’t see any clear standard for keeping track of how much effort was spent on the various things that were assigned.

An alternative is something like GitLab which allows you to run an issue tracker and log time against it with comments (which get added to cumlative totals and then you can run reports on it). But in some cases, folks would rather keep everything in Discourse rather than running two separate systems.

This may not be an actual Discourse feature, but rather may be more of a hack that folks have come up with. Anyone have any experience or ideas?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Interesting. We don’t tend to track time this way, but there have been notable recent improvements to the assign plugin:

• you will be reminded by PM every month (by default, can be set daily / weekly / etc) of any pending assignments

• there is a centralized page for managing all your assignments which cuts across public topic and PM assignments as well.

Anything else I missed here @Roman?

[Roman (Roman Rizzi)]

That’s pretty much everything. Reminders are disabled by default and the weekly option will be available soon.

There are some upcoming features too:

• Users will be able to override the frequency of the reminders (Hopefully, this feature will be available tomorrow)
• Allowed groups will be able to assign topics instead of just admins and moderators (I’m currently working on it).

Assign topics to non-staff users

Is it possible to add the possibility of assigning topics to users of other groups than staff? I would be very much interested in this as well. In a recent Discourse blog post, there is an allusion to such functionality We use a category on our internal instance of Discourse to manage tasks. New tasks are written up in the todo category. In some cases they are immediately assigned and in others, we tag a group to give visibility of the task so that a team member can claim it using Discours…

[tobiaseigen]

Interesting… I think time tracking may be overkill for discourse and it’s not something we use either. There are other tools that are better at it and more flexible, and provide related functionality like invoicing etc. However, I could imagine something could be done with a plugin that lets you record time in a post in a certain syntax, which then displays it in some useful way in the topic title and in the post.

@codinghorror

there have been notable recent improvements to the assign plugin:

Whoa, that’s cool! I just updated and am happy to see this nifty new feature. It will help so much with followup.

[Campano]

@tobiaseigen

我认为时间跟踪对于 Discourse 来说可能有点过了，我们也不使用它。有其他工具在这方面做得更好、更灵活，并提供发票等相关功能。

我的团队在论坛上花费大量时间回复客户请求，我真希望他们能够：

• 将主题与客户关联（也许我可以使用私有标签或类别来做到这一点）
• 声明在回复上花费的时间（在主题中汇总）
• 这样我就可以获得按客户/主题/成员等分类的时间花费报告

发票和其他功能可以通过 API 由其他系统完美处理，但在 Discourse 之外跟踪在 Discourse 上花费的时间非常麻烦。

[hellekin]

leantime 软件 似乎有许多对项目管理有用的配套功能。这里有人在使用 leantime 并能将其与 Discourse 中的项目管理进行功能比较吗？

以下是来自上述链接的 leantime 功能的简要概述：

Leantime	Discourse	Notes
Todos	Kanban Board, Discourse Assign
Milestones	?
Ideas	Topics?
Docs	Discourse Docs
Blueprints	?	(也许 Discourse Templates 在这里会有用？)
Reports	?	(这是 @Campano 的兴趣点)
Timesheets	?	(同上)
Retrospectives	Topics?

我认为，看到在某个主题上花费了多少时间会很有趣，尤其是在任务的背景下。“阅读时间”虽然是一个指示性数字，但缺乏上下文。既然有对主题阅读时间的估算，那么也许可以估算回复主题所花费的时间——或者至少有一些测量方法可以向用户发出警报，告诉他们是否在某个主题上花费了_过多_的时间。但当我写下这些时，我也考虑到了这种时间估算在实现上的噩梦，尤其是因为_写作_与研究写什么或花时间解决问题是不同的，所以它在很大程度上是抽象的，并且与任何单一的_真实_情况脱节。话虽如此，为任务（使用看板）创建一个燃尽图（“报告”），以及里程碑管理（将任务分组以了解范围和跟踪进度）将是有用的。

[Campano]

为了清楚起见，我不是在谈论任何需要讨论跟踪的时间，而是一个声明性字段。正如 OP 所述，该字段也可以是努力、金钱等。