On Tuesday 10th December 2019, we’re going to start rolling out a significant change that will impact current and historical data for all three dashboards.
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You don’t need to take any action.
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The change will take up to 24 hours to roll out across all customers.
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You can continue to use the dashboards in the meantime.
Background
- As we mentioned last week, we’re working on improvements to the dashboards to make them more transparent, reliable and a better fit with your expectations about how the data should be processed.
Why we’re making this change
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One major point of feedback we heard from you is that it’s more important for the dashboard metrics/filters to reflect the current state of the community, rather than ‘what happened at the time’.
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As a result, we’re changing the dashboards to process content data according to the current state of the community.
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This will align the dashboards better with the data you see in the topic/post/user exports, and make the data easier to verify.
Why this date?
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We know that the majority of our customers generate reports at the start or end of each month (and some at the very start of the week).
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We've picked Tuesday 10th December to minimize any disruption to your reporting workflows, as the majority of work involving Dashboards happens at the end and/or beginning of each month.
What is the impact?
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All metrics & filters related to content will be affected (e.g. category, content type, count of # topics).
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Metrics & filters related to users will not be affected, as they are already based on the current state (e.g. user role, user rank, # community members).
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If your community was migrated from another vendor, then your all-time numbers related to content are likely to significantly increase. This is because we’ll be pulling in all content stored on the community (including content from your previous vendor), rather than just the content that we recorded the events for since you started with inSided.
Example scenarios to explain the change
Here are some example scenarios to explain the concept behind the change:
Scenario: trashed topic/reply.
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After the change, if a topic or reply is trashed, the principle is that it will no longer be reflected in the dashboard data.
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If you trash a topic, then the topic counter will go down. It won’t be reflected in metrics such as the average response time.
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The same applies to replies.
Scenario: question converted to conversation
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After the change, if a topic is converted to a different content type, this will be reflected when using the ‘Content Type’ filter and in widgets like ‘Created topic types’ on the content dashboard.
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E.g. converting a question to a conversation will decrease the question counter, and increase the conversation counter.
Scenario: topic moved to a different category
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After the change, if a topic’s category is changed, this will now be reflected in the dashboards.
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This will be most noticeable when using the ‘Popular categories’ widget and when using category as a filter.
Scenario: conversation converted to a reply of another topic (and vice versa - if a reply is promoted to a new topic)
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After the change, if you convert e.g. a question to become the reply of an article, the question counter will go down, and reply counters will go up.
Scenario: you migrated from another vendor.
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After the change, some metrics will increase if you filter over a certain time period. E.g. the total # topics for all time will increase, since it’ll also include migrated content.
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Some data will not be accessible (e.g. checking how many likes a topic got over a certain period on the popular topics details page), since we don’t have the events data from your previous vendor.
We believe this change will make the dashboards much more intuitive and give you more reliable and verifiable insights.
Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions!
