A while back I started a plugin a bit like this for use on Mozilla’s Discourse instance called “Are we Discoursing yet?” (to fit in with a bit of a trend: Areweyet - MozillaWiki), the result of which can be seen at http://arewediscoursingyet.com/
I haven’t really found the time to do any more work on it recently, but the source is at: https://github.com/Mozilla-cIT/arewediscoursingyet (plugin is in plugin branch, frontend is in gh-pages branch).
At the moment it’s rather tailor made for Mozilla (and also rather badly made, it was only after I’d created it that I realised that Discourse was already creating exactly the stats I wanted…), and I doubt I’ll get round to improving it, let alone creating a general purpose plugin, anytime soon.
Of course, if somebody wants to jingle a bag of coins in front of my face that might change things.
Yes, but I can’t have a grpah as in the example given above!
Discourse data and graph are good but not very useful because there aren’t aggregated data, for example new users/posts/topics/loggeduser by month or quarter could be enough. That data are very interesting and useful from the community perspective since I can use them as ROI
Export such data from reports and sum them after it’s not very handy.
Imagine that with options for “Topics, posts, likes” etc., which could be shown all-at-once (with differently color-coded graphs) or individually. The simple date-range selector is also a wonderful feature.
I love checking out the GD Contributors tab, it tells stories. Look at these three for instance:
What happened here? Did they just happily scratch their itch and that’s all there is to it, or did we do something wrong that deterred them from continuing to contribute?
A person might leave a forum for any of countless reasons. Health, family obligations, new employment etc. Real Life has a way of getting in the way and making one change course from time to time.
True, it may not always be a “lack of time” reason, one may leave because they are no longer interested in what is being discussed, maybe there is to much “noise” for their liking, maybe they found someplace they like better. (cough, Facebook)
And I’m not so sure contacting members for an “exit interview” would provide the true reasons or even be a good thing to do.
On the other hand, I do think that seeing an increase or decrease over time would suggest how well a forum is doing. As long as it is remembered that - to steal from SEOers - correlation does not equal causation
From my experience people leave just because they’re not interested so much in your community or only distracted by something else, so they forget to visit, join or be active.
Mentioning them, sending a PM or asking their thoughts about a topic works pretty well in my case: retention is my primary goal currently.
Have those data, graph or statistics help me to know who ping or how/where move forward.
instance.