Okay, so a few days ago me and my friend formed a small admin team and put together a forum and opened the next day. Yeah, we're fast. But upon creating this site, we discovered a few feature that proboards has unleashed. We didn't know how new it was, but it seemed to appear while we were refreshing.

It's filed under Forum Analytics and the only link is Access Analytics. So we clicked it.
And behold, the greatness that was unveiled!

Click for the greatness.

Now, granted, I have not fully taken on the task of discovering what this thing can do, but basically it's real time statistics of your site.

And I know for a fact the other admin have been looking at this like crazy lately.

What would you do if you had a feature like this?
Do other forum hosts have something similar?
If so how do you use it / what do you keep track of most?
Has it helped you any?

well google analytics does a similar thing. xD you can get the code and put it on any website, and then you can see how many guests and hits you've had in total on any pages. but it doesn't show usernames. then again, i don't think it really needs to. XD i wouldn't join proboards just for the names when i can use any other board server and use google.

What would you do if you had a feature like this? I don't know, It's seems like a cool feature, I'd most probably show the community, they can see how active the forum's going.
Do other forum hosts have something similar? IPB I'm pretty sure has something in their MYSQL, when you're setting up a forum via MYSQL you go back to that once it's done and it'll show you some quite decent features.
If so how do you use it / what do you keep track of most? I mostly keep track on my statistics, after all landmarks are impressive and generally, that's what most people look at first.
Has it helped you any? It hasn't helped me yet, but if you had a website, it'd help massively, because you could make it into a ''Number of hits...'' Mod instead/also.


[B]

Well, it isn't WHY we used proboards. I'd use proboards with or without it. But good to know if I ever decided to switch (and if I like this feature) that something similar is available.

Many web servers also offer this on board without even using Google analytics. Sometimes they charge extra for it though :D

That said, I use Google, and I love it. I love seeing when we have a decline in hits and trying to figure out what was going on on the forum during that time, or checking out big spikes of activity and trying to match them to announcements we've done, etc. ^^;

It's very handy.

I'm on proboards too and I regularly look at my analytics. It doesn't really tell you anything about your members that the boards themselves don't already tell you. It just makes it a lot easier to see at a glance. Who's online, who's posting the most, how many posts are coming in, how many people are visiting--these things are already available through profiles and info centre.

I find it extremely useful. I can get a general sense of when the site is more busy and whe it's less and how constant this is from day to day. visitations are more regular than postings, but even post patterns are pretty constant during the week. They do change over the weekends, but I already knew that.

It just puts your basic stats into perspective and lets you get a better sense of whether your board is growing, shrinking or staying about the same and what topics are hottest. Such as, if most or all of your top 5 topics are OOC topics and it's an RPG board, something is wrong. You should have about a 50-50 mix or a little more RPing. If it's far less then the analytics help you see this better and let you know you need to shift the focus more towards the actual game.

The only thing I think they should include that they haven't already is keepin a record of the stats over a longer period of time.

I think I started a thread on something similar to this back in January. Here's the link if you're interested. xD

GOOGLE ANALYTICS, SUPER USEFUL OR PLAIN CREEPY OVERKILL?

Well as of a few hours ago my analytics stopped registering hits and posts, as well as online users and other stuff. Still showing what registered before then, but seems to be broken now. I've contacted them about it.