Community Reports
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Is there a way to run custom reports other than what's available in the dashboard?
For example, if I want historical data on
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Users registered per month
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new posts per month
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Replies per month
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Users online per month
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Most voted on topics, etc.
New to NodeBB, so not sure what all can be done. I tried searching the forums, but nothing related came up.
Thanks!
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Not through the app, no. You could put them into a custom plugin (we'd all love this stuff!!) or you could write a query to do it manually to run against the database.
More reports and more flexibility on reports are at the top of my list of desires for sure.
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@scottalanmiller @dennismsmith have you considered looking into nodebb-plugin-reports? You can even add custom reports from different plugins.
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@julian said in Community Reports:
@scottalanmiller @dennismsmith have you considered looking into nodebb-plugin-reports? You can even add custom reports from different plugins.
Looks like it just outputs CSV? Would be awesome to see it integrate with the web interface.
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@julian said in Community Reports:
That's a good idea. I think a JSON endpoint would be helpful (although then there are some considerations regarding who can view, but then I can make it a new privilege... hm! Some things to think about...)
I'm find with it just on the admin panel like other things. Permissions to share reports with others without admin access would be a sweet additional feature. But just more selection of reporting on the admin panel would at least let me easily grab what I need to see all the time.
Info on user rates, individual user rates, being able to select time periods, etc. The current reports are extremely limited. And only work for things like "past month", the "select your dates" even doesn't fully do what is expected. Leaving us with very little way to look at the kinds of info we'd like without querying the DB directly.
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Yes indeed... the dashboard is fairly minimal on purpose, since it provides more of a bird's eye view on what's going on with your forum. The expectation is that you'd plug in some more detailed analytics software if you need more control over data retrieval, etc., such as Google Analytics, Piwik, and so on.
That said... https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-reports/issues/1 and https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-reports/issues/2 should help
The actual number of reports available is minimal right now, but more can be added via PR (or by plugins, for custom reporting)
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@julian said in Community Reports:
such as Google Analytics, Piwik, and so on.
these don't pull from the database and don't seem to get useful data that we've seen.
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In my experience, they gather more useful data including things like how your users are travelling through the site, etc.Now, of course, I haven't spent a lengthy amount of time digging into what GA can do, but I'd imagine it'd be more than what we provide out of the box.
What did you mean when you said you wanted to learn info about user rates? Like posting rates? That one you're right, GA won't do...
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@julian said in Community Reports:
In my experience, they gather more useful data including things like how your users are travelling through the site, etc
For us, that's not useful. Nor accurate, from what we've seen. GA will report zero activity while people are actively having conversations. The GA platform is just useless to us, it gives bad data (bad data is worse than no data), and what data it focuses on doesn't seem relevant. We know that people almost entirely work from searches (don't need info on that from GA) or from the "unread" list (GA has no knowledge of what they are doing.) So every time we look at GA we go "why do we have this?"
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@julian said in Community Reports:
What did you mean when you said you wanted to learn info about user rates? Like posting rates? That one you're right, GA won't do...
Right, and this is what we want to know the most. We want to understand posting patterns and to track people. GA tracks "navigation" but not activity. We don't care about navigation, we care about activity. GA is designed around tracking people on a sales brochure site to see when they are reading your marketing materials. But we are a forum / community and we want to track how people are living inside the platform.
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@julian said in Community Reports:
Yeah that's something we could implement as a built-in report in the reports plugin. Would be good to know your thoughts regarding what other metrics you'd like to see as a report (either all in one report or as separate reports)
I can definitely make a list of things that we would use
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@scottalanmiller Made you a community rep on the forum. You've earned it
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@julian said in Community Reports:
@scottalanmiller Made you a community rep on the forum. You've earned it
Woot, thanks!
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@julian said in Community Reports:
Anyhow, yes I'd be interested in seeing a list. The reports plugin is mostly a stub right now, but it's all functional. I'd be open to adding in the logic to pull any data you think would be useful to have.
I'm making a post about it now.
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@julian said in Community Reports:
nodebb-plugin-reports
Sorry, just now seeing this reply....I see @scottalanmiller has replied and I pretty much echo his sentiments
, as GA has not been very useful in the metrics we want to track around user engagement and activity especially when we want to see what's been happening M/M or Q/Q.In addition to what I stated in the OP, in the past I've measured:
User stats (replies, accepted answers, etc)
Avg response times (for internal teams) -
@dennismsmith said in Community Reports:
User stats (replies, accepted answers, etc)
Avg response times (for internal teams)Oh, I like that (response times.)
