Hearing you, but I think it’s worth investigating potential ways that it could work before discounting.
IMO one of the most confusing things about Discourse for CMs that aren’t active here on Meta is ‘why isn’t this working? oh – because something changed that I wasn’t aware of’. Updates in the Dashboard (ala Wordpress) seems like an easy solution.
Curious about this. Why?
While “what’s new” is a fine idea, it does nothing to advance a community. Is a new emoji picker feature going to somehow get more people to come to a struggling community? The idea of the dashboard is to show you where your community’s weak points are so that you might endeavor to improve them.
That’s fair.
A link to another repository of info would prob be a good compromise.
Some prior art:
Lots to say on this topic! but I’m in leisure-reading mode until next week.
I’d like to see a “Ten most recent staff notes” table, helping mods identify any users that require staff attention, and also identifying recent staff interventions (e.g. official warnings).
“Staff notes” are very useful, but the plugin lacks reporting.
When I click through to something like “Visits” to see that plotted over time, I currently have to go back and then click through on something else like “Posts” to see that plotted over time.
It’d be nice at minimum to be able to switch between those two once I’m looking at a graph. Better would be to see things plotted on the same page to get some insights into how things are correlated.
How much people are reading seems like one of the most fundamental 
things we should be measuring.
We’ve started to play around with better ways to measure this and so far, something like this is looking promising:
We are also exploring measuring writing activity similarly:
We chose 28 day periods because we see activity varies considerably with the day of the week. So choosing a period that always includes the same number of Sundays seemed like it might be a good way to handle that.
In both reports, the break points in our data explorer queries for each “bucket” are powers of 2, but in the reading case, we collapsed some of them to simplify the visualization.
On the admin dashboard, I’d love to see:
I also agree with @jomaxro that better data exports and customisable date ranges would be a huge help.
In terms of version changes…
Maybe just a link to the applicable #releases post here on Meta?
For what it’s worth, as community manager I’d like to know when users move along the engagement curve.
Dashboard should reflect that. Who’s became inactive? Who’s more active recently? Who and how many?
Average time spent in writing a message would also be a nice stat to have.
I’m interested to know how you’d use this.
Quick messages = quick happy messages OR flame war
Slow mesages = more thought out messages
This was how I considered. Not sure how to use it 
Are you saying you’d like to see a statistic on users activity, like a chart of some sort? Just curious as to how you would utilize this function?
I like that idea. It could lead to an early or earlier promotion to Regular status or delay a promotion based user participation. 
I know that Discourse is able to show where one IP address is being used by more than one member account (eg: alias’s) thanks to the IP lookup button available, which, when clicked on in a members profile, lists all the member names using that IP address.
It would be nice if the admin console could show all the offending membership IDs, coveringvall the memberson the site already in a central “report”, so we don’t have to try and find this alias’s manually on suspicion.
It would be good if we could still have options on that same table to block the alias’s from that same screen.
Ok there’s a good chance that this feature is already “in there” somewhere, and I just haven’t found it yet. 
@HAWK I’ll dig up my notes - it got put on the backburner a couple of weeks ago Could be worth chatting about this in more detail at Swarm.
Yeah, sounds like a plan. 
YES. ABSOLUTELY. PLEASE.
Yes! As we’re using „rolling release” model, sometimes it’s really confusing to log in after upgrade and find everything changed on the backend 
Besides, I’d love to see some menu tweaks.
Also would love allowing administrators to decide if they can handle welcome messages on their own, but I’ sure that it wont happen.
Not as part of the dashboard project.
I’d love to see these numbers on the dashboard, linking to a filtered member list. This would let us get a handle on how active our community is and who specifically we need to target to bring them back in.
- Number of members who were active in the last 30 days
- Number of members who were active in the last 90 days
- Number of members who were active 90 to 180 days ago
- Dormant members (not active within 180 days)
- Percentage of members who were active in the last 30 days of total number of members
I like @tobiaseigen idea, the view of how your communities participation is brilliant, what about the ability to customize the dashboard, like a pencil icon on the top to display or hide on what you want visible on the dashboard. Like for say you don’t want the total number of admins and moderators to be displayed, hit the pencil to show options to show or hide it, while in the edit menu, include category names of what’s hidden and shown if you want something to be displayed again
