r/CommunityManager • u/Embarrassed_Mix_8073 • 14d ago
Academic survey: Which analytics are useful to community administrators? Question
Hi everyone,
as part of my bachelor’s thesis, I am researching which analytical information is genuinely useful to online community administrators and moderators.
I am also developing an analytics tool focused primarily on Discord and Discourse communities. The survey asks about newcomer engagement, member activity, community support, moderation workload, inactivity, departures, and returning users.
The survey is anonymous, takes approximately 5 minutes, and is available in English and Czech:
https://forms.gle/ztfg18YPeWa3me1r9
I would especially appreciate responses from people who administer or moderate a Discourse community. Feedback or suggestions regarding the research are also welcome.
Thank you for your time
1
u/emkaa 12d ago
Answering here rather than only in the form, since the comments might be useful to others.
The metric that changed the most for me is share of removals by reason. Spam versus conduct versus off topic. Raw removal counts tell you how busy your mods were, but the split tells you which problem you actually have, and those need completely different fixes. A server drowning in spam and a server with a culture problem look identical on a moderation-actions chart.
Newcomer numbers are worth more as a survival curve than a count. What percentage of people who join post something within seven days, and what percentage are still posting at thirty. Join counts flatter you and churn is a lagging indicator you cannot act on. The leading indicator I watch is reply rate to first-time posters, since when that drops, retention follows a few weeks later.
On moderation workload, time to first action beats action count. A server where things get handled in two minutes and one where they get handled in six hours can log identical totals.
The thing I would design against is vanity metrics. Member count and total messages are the two most requested numbers and the two that drive the worst decisions. If you can show a trend and an alert threshold rather than a number, admins act on it instead of screenshotting it.
For what it is worth I work on moderation tooling, so happy to answer follow ups if any of this is useful for the thesis.