The "Big Fajitas" Report
Late last year, we set a goal for the core Community Server development team with regards to forum participation on communityserver.org. In order to see how we were tracking against that goal, I wrote some SQL. But, to get the data, I needed to get a backup of the live database, run it locally, and send out the results. This meant that I'd only be able to run the report monthly (unless I wanted to bug someone weekly).
Since the feedback loop wasn't instantaneous enough for me, I instead created a "report" (a couple filters, a button, and a bound datagrid). And while it's not "fully-integrated" into the core CS solution, it is available to me online (under the name Kevin gave it, Big Fajitas). Since the results are immediate, it's been extremely useful and something I peek at on a daily/weekly basis. It is basically a breakdown of post/thread counts, post length, days posted, and a couple other metrics grouped by user.
As you can see below, it will return statistics for all users within any single role for a given date range. The checkbox is just to filter out the forums that "shouldn't" count. After using it consistently this month, I'm finding that I'd prefer some standard dates, so I plan on updating it to support more friendly scenarios in addition to custom date ranges. (Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week, This Month, This Year, ...)
As for the results seen below (I removed the usernames to protect the innocent) it's useful to track posts vs. threads. A thread is a discussion, while a post is just a question, answer, or thought. I also find it helpful to see how often we're getting on the forums and actually answering questions. With just a post count, it's unclear whether we're regularly engaging folks. Finally, there's a couple other calculated values that help round out the picture.
So, what's next? I'd still love to add more tracked metrics, add the ability to export the results, and connect the data to some charts to get a better visual representation. But since this ain't an official report in Community Server (yet), it'll have to wait until I've got some free nights.