Data at Your Fingertips: Explore Our New Reporting and Statistical Capabilities

[Ryan Ashbrook]

Our June release includes enhancements to our various statistics and reporting features included within the community.

Statistics are important for a community platform because they provide valuable insights about user engagement, preferences, and behaviors, which directly inform the platform's strategy and design. Furthermore, statistics enable the monitoring of the platform's growth and user retention, which are essential for maintaining a vibrant and active community.

In our June release, we have made some enhancements to those features that will allow you to more quickly monitor those trends.

Saved Charts

In Invision Community 4.3, we introduced the ability to save charts to allow you to view them multiple times without needing to reset your filters each time. This works well, however there are three notable downsides.

1. You could only save a chart if there were filters to apply, such as Warning Types, Device Types, Member Groups, etc.
2. Any specified timescale was not retained in your saved chart.
3. There was no centralized location to view every chart you have saved.

In our June release, we have resolved both of those issues. Now, every chart can be saved regardless of if there are filters or not, and when saved, will now also retain your timescale as well. In addition to that, we have added an additional My Saved Charts page. This page will show you every chart you have saved, including all filters and timescales that have been selected.

From this page you can quickly review all charts, temporarily adjust their timescales and filters to quickly see other information, as well as download each individual chart as a CSV directly from this page.

Don't worry, though - your saved charts will also still show in their original locations just as they have in the past.

Content Level Statistics

Later on, in Invision Community 4.5, we introduced an improved Topic View that included various statistical information about the topic including the top comments, popular days, top commenters, and more. This, however, was only limited to topics in the forums, and not the rest of the community. In our June release, we have taken this and expanded it to content in every application. This includes Blog Entries, Gallery Albums, Gallery Images, and more.

Each content item (such as a topic, blog entry or image) will show a new button for those with moderator permissions which opens a full statistics and analytics modal, providing expanded statistical information related to that particular piece of content specifically.

Clicking this new button opens up the statistics and analytics modal. Our Classic customers will see the following view:

Cloud Powered Historical View Tracking

For our Invision Community cloud customers, we have expanded our infrastructure to allow for storing historical views for all content.

On the previously mentioned Statistics and Analytics modal, a chart will be shown that outlines the amount of views that content has gotten every single day over a period of time, to allow you to see when specifically content was popular. This chart allows you to view trends for up to a year in the past.

Additionally, we have expanded this to content containers Forums, Downloads Categories, Blogs, Blogs Categories, Gallery Categories, and more will all report their own historical view trends.

Finally, these trends can be exported as a CSV file for your own personal processing if desired - and if needed, you can choose to only include certain types of content if you are focusing on one particular section.

We hope these changes help you to identify trends from within your own community to help you promote and grow it further.

The features and changes presented here are available in the following packages:

• Saved charts and content item level statistics: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise, Community Classic (Self Hosted).
• Saved charts, content item level statistics, analytic report generation, content level historical view tracking, container level historical view tracking: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise.

If you do not see your product or package listed, please contact us to talk about upgrading your Invision Community.

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[Adriano Faria]

Quote

Content Level Statistics

Later on, in Invision Community 4.5, we introduced an improved Topic View that included various statistical information about the topic including the top comments, popular days, top commenters, and more. This, however, was only limited to topics in the forums, and not the rest of the community. In our June release, we have taken this and expanded it to content in every application. This includes Blog Entries, Gallery Albums, Gallery Images, and more.

Will this replace the topic sidebar in the Forums app? Is this used in \IPS\Content\Statistics so we can use it in 3rd-party resources?

[Matt]

No, but you can use the new modal view in your content items. You'll just need to drop in the template call in the relevant part of your template to add the button: {template="analyticsItemLink" app="core" group="system" params="$item"}

[Joel R]

Clubs - I would like to see club statistics and to offer them to Club Leaders and / or Moderators.  

[Adriano Faria]

On 6/6/2023 at 10:29 AM, Ryan Ashbrook said:

Content Level Statistics

Later on, in Invision Community 4.5, we introduced an improved Topic View that included various statistical information about the topic including the top comments, popular days, top commenters, and more. This, however, was only limited to topics in the forums, and not the rest of the community. In our June release, we have taken this and expanded it to content in every application. This includes Blog Entries, Gallery Albums, Gallery Images, and more.

Each content item (such as a topic, blog entry or image) will show a new button for those with moderator permissions which opens a full statistics and analytics modal, providing expanded statistical information related to that particular piece of content specifically.

Clicking this new button opens up the statistics and analytics modal.

Why is this a moderation thing? Why regular users can't view so basic statistics?

Why Most Active Members, Most Popular Days or Top Reacted Comments have to be hidden from the general public, or even guests?

[Adriano Faria]

Similar info is available for guests in the topics:

[Hisashi]

Will views now only show to moderators?

I handle this feature in a different format on my website, this would be a concern.

{$record->record_views}

Edited June 7, 2023 by Hisashi

[Adriano Faria]

13 hours ago, Hisashi said:

Will views now only show to moderators?

No, it won't show to anyone. It was indeed removed from the content items; they don't extend \IPS\Content\Views  anymore, which the method stats rely on to display the number of views. Now they use a new trait (\IPS\Content\ViewUpdates), which is used to display the number of views in the new feature announced in the first post.

[Marc]

26 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

No, it won't show to anyone. It was indeed removed from the content items; they don't extend \IPS\Content\Views  anymore, which the method stats rely on to display the number of views. Now they use a new trait (\IPS\Content\ViewUpdates), which is used to display the number of views in the new feature announced in the first post.

I believe this may well be a bug

[Adriano Faria]

We hope. 🙂

[Hisashi]

2 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

I believe this may well be a bug

Please, I hope this is really it.

[Marc]

7 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

We hope. 🙂

No need

5 minutes ago, Hisashi said:

Please, I hope this is really it.

 

It is 

 

[Adriano Faria]

17 hours ago, Adriano Faria said:

Why is this a moderation thing? Why regular users can't view so basic statistics?

Why Most Active Members, Most Popular Days or Top Reacted Comments have to be hidden from the general public, or even guests?

@Marc Stridgen, do you have any news about this? Is it a bug too?

[Adriano Faria]

1 hour ago, Adriano Faria said:

No, it won't show to anyone. It was indeed removed from the content items; they don't extend \IPS\Content\Views  anymore, which the method stats rely on to display the number of views. Now they use a new trait (\IPS\Content\ViewUpdates), which is used to display the number of views in the new feature announced in the first post.

 

34 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

It is

This one is fixed in Beta 2. 👍

@Stuart Silvester, could you add also allow \IPS\Content\Views in the method stats? Otherwise, we'll have to upgrade all 3rd-party resources that use it.

It also should be in Changes affecting third-party developers and designers section of 4.7.11 release note.

Edited June 8, 2023 by Adriano Faria

[Marc]

2 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

 

This one is fixed in Beta 2. 👍

We hope 😉 

9 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

@Marc Stridgen, do you have any news about this? Is it a bug too?

This is not a bug, no. As mentioned in the original message, this is currently available to moderation. Thank you for the feedback though. Always appreciated and I will pass that on for you.

[Adriano Faria]

4 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

As mentioned in the original message, this is currently available to moderation

...which is pretty weird as the same info is available in the topic view (sidebar) and anyone can easily see what's the most reacted post/comment, or the images attached, or the busiest day, so this is hiding public information.

5 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

Always appreciated and I will pass that on for you.

Thank you.

[MMXII]

1 hour ago, Adriano Faria said:

No, it won't show to anyone. It was indeed removed from the content items

I'd actually love to have an AdminCP option to allow/deny views for every content item. 🙂

[Adriano Faria]

1 hour ago, Adriano Faria said:

@Stuart Silvester, could you add also allow \IPS\Content\Views in the method stats? Otherwise, we'll have to upgrade all 3rd-party resources that use it.

It also should be in Changes affecting third-party developers and designers section of 4.7.11 release note.

I guess this says it all:

Quote

Changes affecting third-party developers and designers

• \IPS\Helpers\Form\Text 'autocomplete' option now has a boolean 'alphabetical' sub-option to force values to sort alphabetically.
• \IPS\Content\Views interface has been deprecated, you should use the \IPS\Content\ViewUpdates trait instead.

👍

[Hisashi]

Looks like it's been fixed.

[Dreadknux]

I have a question: one of the things I'd really make use of is a means to track and analyse long-term user/visitor data for my IPS Suite in general as well as on a per-Pages database basis (say, for a news database). I have Google Analytics, sure, but it would be great to have something a bit more native as well. Is this part of this update, and if so is it available for Self-Hosted?

I would expect a simple page that outlines historical 'News' Database records in a chart and list Views/Comments etc isn't something that requires any kind of cloud technology (the views/comments for each Pages record is counted on the platform already, this would just be compiling everything in a trackable way), so if something like this would be exclusive to cloud customers my follow-up question would be, would it be a time-limited exclusivity (i.e. cloud customers get the feature for a year or so to help get dev costs back more efficiently, then made available for self-hosted)? If so, I wouldn't mind that. I can wait for such a feature. 🙂

[Marc]

18 hours ago, Dreadknux said:

I have a question: one of the things I'd really make use of is a means to track and analyse long-term user/visitor data for my IPS Suite in general as well as on a per-Pages database basis (say, for a news database). I have Google Analytics, sure, but it would be great to have something a bit more native as well. Is this part of this update, and if so is it available for Self-Hosted?

I would expect a simple page that outlines historical 'News' Database records in a chart and list Views/Comments etc isn't something that requires any kind of cloud technology (the views/comments for each Pages record is counted on the platform already, this would just be compiling everything in a trackable way), so if something like this would be exclusive to cloud customers my follow-up question would be, would it be a time-limited exclusivity (i.e. cloud customers get the feature for a year or so to help get dev costs back more efficiently, then made available for self-hosted)? If so, I wouldn't mind that. I can wait for such a feature. 🙂

Which items are available on which platforms is at the bottom of the original post there. For clarification, these are what is available to each client.

On 6/6/2023 at 2:29 PM, Ryan Ashbrook said:

The features and changes presented here are available in the following packages:

• Saved charts and content item level statistics: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise, Community Classic (Self Hosted).
• Saved charts, content item level statistics, analytic report generation, content level historical view tracking, container level historical view tracking: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise.

Note, these are content item level, not page level. 

[SjorsK]

Interesting! 🙂 More insights are always better!

[marklcfc]

On 6/7/2023 at 8:59 PM, Adriano Faria said:

Similar info is available for guests in the topics:

I don’t use either of these blocks

I’d like the new stats icon to be available to members too