Toggle to hide crawlers from Consolidated Pageviews

[fhe (Florian)]

First of all, I love the new consolidated pageviews graph that is displayed on the dashboard starting with 2.2.0.beta9! I see even more room for improvement here, maybe it’s something specific to my community, but the crawlers are having their fair share of the overall pageviews:

This makes it difficult to visually inspect the day to day changes in, e.g., pageviews of logged in users.

My suggestion is to provide a toggle that hides crawlers and one that hides pageviews of anonymous users (adjusting the graph dimensions to the respective maximum).

This way, if pageviews of crawlers are hidden, the actual users would be more visible. If then also anonymous users are hidden, community health wrt. logged in users could be inspected more closely.

What do you think?

[joffreyjaffeux]

It will come in a future update, at least on the dedicated report page : /admin/reports/consolidated_page_views?start_date=2018-12-23&end_date=2019-01-23

We are working on a PR to have this kind of arbitrary filters easier to do: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/6816

Doing this on the chart itself would be very easy to do, but I think this is a lot of visual space, for something you will end up clicking rarely. But I totally support it on the standalone report page.

[fhe (Florian)]

It will come in a future update, at least on the dedicated report page

That’s good news! Thanks for pointing to the PR.

Doing this on the chart itself would be very easy to do, but I think this is a lot of visual space, for something you will end up clicking rarely

One option would be to toggle-cycle through the different views by clicking on the graph itself. Not sure if this is something you’re up to. Maybe it’s too non-obvious (is this even a word?) and would result in more support overhead.

[joffreyjaffeux]

I do have some ideas to bring it on the chart directly, but it’s more involved and also requires the PR.

[fhe (Florian)]

I want to come back to this again and propose another change, which might be easier to realize:

What do you think about rearranging the different bars so that logged in users are at the bottom, anonymous users in the middle and crawlers on top? This would allow for a better understanding of the differences in traffic of real users.

[bartv (Bart)]

And now that I look at the graph again after reading your suggestion, I realised that the color coding could be improved too: currently the web crawlers get the highest visual ‘weight’ and logged in users the lowest. This should be reversed (but maybe that will automatically happen once the order is changed?).

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

For inspiration I think grafana does a good job here so its a reasonable idea to emulate it.

In particular on /admin/reports/consolidated_page_views?start_date=2019-01-09&end_date=2019-02-09 you can display the label names and have them clickable, when bold they show when non bold they do not show the series.

One extra bit of interesting fancy grafana has is that you can use control as well which lets you select 2 out of 4.

Eg:

Not saying we emulate this 1-1, but its an interesting and nicely established pattern.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

rearranging the different bars so that logged in users are at the bottom, anonymous users in the middle and crawlers on top? This would allow for a better understanding of the differences in traffic of real users.

I do think this is a good idea. Your “base” is logged in users, the next most valuable is anonymous real users, bots and crawlers least valuable of all. Value @joffreyjaffeux

[joffreyjaffeux]

Ok done in:

FIX: reverse consolidated pageviews stacked chart order (#7001)