Filter reports and analytics on segments of users

By the way, be sure to vote on this idea as well ^ ;) 

Thanks for your idea @JessEs! I can definitely understand your use cases. However, we see that custom roles are also being (ab)used to create segments of users. Therefore, we’re currently considering making it possible to actually create segments as a feature (based on certain filters, i.e. email domain, number of likes, posts, signup date, etc.). You could then automate certain actions for those segments, but we could also consider your idea to be able to export segments and filter analytics based on these segments. Just to double check: would being able to segment users dynamically and then perform the actions you mentioned above offer you more flexibility than manually having so assign custom roles? And if so, would you mind if I change the title of the suggestion to ‘Filter reports and analytics on segments of users’ to make it a little more specific?

You can read more on this in this topic, in which we’d like to gather some feedback on this. Feel free to weigh in here as well.

Hi @Sebastian  thanks for your reply.

Yes, please change the title.

As to your question: would being able to segment users dynamically and then perform the actions you mentioned above offer you more flexibility than manually having so assign custom roles?

It depends how these “segments” are set up.

• If they will be predefined, and/or offer only some of these features, then I doubt they’ll be useful at all.
• If they’ll be created and managed by my team, and offer the same possibilities as custom roles currently do (filtering user search, controlling visibility of forums, assigning rank, etc) -- then yes we can use them the same way we currently use the custom roles.
• If this AND the reporting, analytics, and automated actions features I mentioned, then they will be truly useful (and we can stop using the custom roles and custom profile fields for this).

@Sebastian it occurs to me that I should mention something else. In some cases, we need to “stack” custom roles/segments. (This is one reason Custom user roles have worked well.)

We have several product types (developer, end user, etc) which overlap with several user types (academic, consultant, developer, etc). We need to be able to assign more than one to a user profile. For example, a consultant who is also an academic and uses both developer and end user products.

Was about to add a similar idea here, @Sebastian. With Segments in Beta, it’d be ideal for Analytics dashboards to be filterable by segments in the future.