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Forum Update: New Features (October 2021)
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This post covers changes over the last few months.
We recently added Sarah Cheng and Jonathan Mustin to the Forum’s development team, and they’ve both contributed to the features in this post.
It’s finally here! You can now see how many views one of your posts has gotten.
Just click “analytics” next to your post:
You’ll see this page, but probably with different numbers. (If not, spooky.)
Hover over the graph to see statistics for individual days.
We're planning to add more features based on feedback from authors. If you have a metric you'd like to see added or other feedback, let us know in the suggestion thread or in a private message.
We’ve made a few changes to the Groups/Events page:
If you ever scroll through Recent Discussion, you may have seen this already:
The Forum Digest now reaches more than 1700 subscribers. After 54 emails, we’ve had fewer than 100 people unsubscribe, which is a good sign!
People didn’t love the idea of a banner at the top of the front page, so we put it in a less obtrusive place:
The above is our only sidebar banner so far. In the future, we’ll use this space for a variety of resources, and will cycle between them each time you open the frontpage.
Clicking “X” will hide all banners for a month.
Cool to see post metrics released! Some thoughts:
I'm attaching below an image of Medium's Stats dashboard for those who aren't familiar with it. The top-half of Medium's stats dashboard also has nice aggregate data on # of views and reads in the last 30 days, and that would be cool to see on the EA Forum too, but that's probably less valuable than just the table view below.
I know you said that you'd like feedback via the feature suggestions thread or via private message, but I thought more people would see it here. If you'd like me to post this on the feature suggestions thread as well, let me know!
Thanks for your feedback, this is super valuable!
Re 1&2, we should definitely add a note about how early the data goes (it does go all the way back to March 2020). Unfortunately the data I felt was most valuable to plot (views by unique devices), we suffered from a data collection issue in the first half of 2021. Fortunately we do have a note that appears on posts older than June 2021, unfortunately it apparently wasn't noticeable.
Re 3, I had not thought of a dashboard like that, but I like the idea a lot, thanks for making it. (I'd be curious if other authors reading this also like it, let us know!)
Glad to hear! Numbering my responses:
4.5. Re "average time", this turned out to be harder than I expected, so I decided to wait to see if anyone asked for it, but now I have my excuse to spend time figuring it out, mwahaha.
On #3, yeah I'd be interested to hear other's views too.
On #4 and 4.5, ah I see. Personally I think # of reads (i.e. # of views where the user spent at least 50% of the time it takes to read the article) or average time spent would be more interesting to me than the bounce rate, although I'm unsure.
I made some updates that should address a lot of this. Let me know what you think!
Thanks! I think these updates are good. Some thoughts/suggestions: