Since Discourse has been running for over a year, I thought I’d post some statistics on usage, and my thoughts. These stats run since September 2022, and you can ignore the numbers for September 2023 since the month is not complete.
Overall usage has been increasing over the last year, showing increases in user pageviews, signups, topics, posts, and other activity measures.
Most of the graphs are self explanatory, except for DAU/MAU and daily engaged users. DAU/MAU is the ratio of users logged in in the last day to those logged in in the last month. Discourse recommends to aim for >20%. Daily engaged users are users who have liked or posted in the last day.
There are additional activity metrics comparing current activity with the last few days. These are more of a snapshot of recent history.
The only unusual activity is we had a substantial increase in flagging due to a couple of heated topics. Most of the flagging activity was on August 7th-8th and August 27th-28th.
There are more details on searches and top topics for inbound links. These are over the last year.
On this topic, I’ve been experimenting with generating a “Signal to Noise Ratio” to measure the quality of a user’s contribution to this forum. I wrote it over the last week while traveling through Europe so apologies if that generated any weird access stats for you. I also haven’t released the code because it does some rather hack-ish things in scraping the /directory_items HTTP REST end point.
Below is a one-time output that I generated just now as a demonstration:
For both social and technical reasons I’m not planning to go any further with this but I thought it was a neat concept.
