What are the metrics for a healthy community?

[tophee (Christoph)]

If you haven’t seen them yet, these topics might be relevant:

Don't be fooled by activity metrics – they may vary greatly in different community types

While studying basic statistics of various communities for a chapter in my book, I made a discovery: healthy and active communities may demonstrate very different metric results. So my conclusion so far is that you should not rely on basic activity stats to measure healthiness of an online community. I calculated activity per active users in last month: Topics created per user vary from 0.07 to 0.55 – this makes a huge difference, i.e. 7 new topics vs 55 new topics per 100 active users per …

https://meta.discourse.org/t/required-metrics-for-a-successful-active-forum/2782?u=tophee

How to quantify the success of your community?

I’m just starting to try to understand how best to go about this too. The admin dashboard in Discourse does offer some decent data, with indicators that show whether certain metrics are going up or down compared to previous daily, weekly or monthly periods. One of the motivations for a question I asked earlier this week about the last_seen_date was that I was starting to try to get a better sense of how to define and measure how many active users there really are. There seem to be a number of…