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Hello,

We're revamping the metrics we report on for the new year and I was wondering if anyone has figured out a good way of mapping time to value on the community? I'm thinking "time to first meaningful interaction" could be good to track but the problem is we have a lot of people who log on to view content but don't post themselves and I don't know if that really captures the value they get out of the space… We post a lot of informational content and I do think that the "lurkers" are getting value out of it, I'm just not sure how to reflect that. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

The holiday season is your time to recharge—but your community shouldn’t go quiet just because you’re out of office! With Scheduled Posts and Automation Rules in Vanilla, you can keep the conversation flowing and critical tasks handled automatically. Here’s how to set it up so you enjoy your break with peace of mind. 🌟

🗓️ 1. Plan Ahead with Scheduled Posts

Write up a series of posts, questions, ideas, or articles before you leave and schedule them to publish while you’re away.

🔹 Why this helps:
Scheduled posts keep fresh content in your community—even when you’re offline—which encourages ongoing engagement.
🔹 How it works:
While you’re creating your content, use the Schedule option to pick a future date and time for publishing. You can schedule events, discussions, questions, or articles weeks in advance.

💡 Pro tip: Create a mix of evergreen tips, discussion prompts, or community highlights that resonate even without immediate moderation.

🤖 2. Set Up Automation Rules to Manage Tasks

Automation Rules can act like virtual helpers—automatically performing tasks based on triggers you define.

🔹 Escalate posts to support:
If a community member posts something that needs support attention, configure an Automation Rule to escalate it (e.g., to Zendesk, Freshdesk or another ticketing system). This ensures your support team doesn’t miss urgent issues while you’re away.

🔹 Handle flagged or inactive content:
Create rules to bump posts with no activity, add tags, or even escalate content that receives a set number of reports. This keeps content moving without manual oversight.

💡 Pro tip: Name your rules descriptively (“Holiday Escalations,” “Unanswered Questions Escalate”) so they’re easy to manage later.

🧠 Bonus Tips for a Smoother Holiday

✨ Run a final check: Before you leave, make sure all scheduled posts are set with the correct times and categories.
✨ Preview your Automation Rules: Run them once manually to ensure they behave as you expect.
✨ Let your community know: Consider publishing a friendly post letting members know you’ll be out but the community is still active—and give them tips on how to get quick help.

Enjoy your holidays—and let Vanilla do what it does best while you take a well-deserved break! 🎉

Hey @Genevieve P! I can answer a couple of these for you while we're waiting on confirmation for the third.

They need to click into individual groups to see the discussions there - is that expected??

Yes this is the expected behavior, you need to navigate to each group individually to see the discussions in each, there's no global "Group discussions" page that holds them all (although this is an interesting idea).

Is the Quick Links the only way to get there, now?

Generally the Groups page will be accessible via the Quick Links and the Title Bar, but you could also add a CTA widget on any layout editor pages, or use the Category as Link feature to add an access method on that page as well.

Hey Marco - just want to acknowledge that I've seen this. I'm going to try to set up a similar dashboard on your community just to test the one that I created. Maybe seeing it used on a different dataset will help me refine it the chart and provide everyone something that works better.

Appreciate your patience! I'll get back to you soon!

Hey Marco - I made a mistake thinking about this as an analytics problem (getting a little too close to the holidays). There was a period of time in the date frame where a question existed with a comment, but hadn't been accepted yet, so the analytics logic was pulling that question into the chart - even though, more recently, a user had marked an answer as 'Accepted.'

The better way to get this information is with this API call:

See data in browser:
/api/v2/discussions?dateInserted=&type=question&status=answered&hasComments=true

Download CSV of Data:
/api/v2/discussions.csv?dateInserted=&type=question&status=answered&hasComments=true

That is pulling a list of questions that have the status answered. You can sort them by adding &sort=dateInserted, &sort=dateLastComment or &sort=discussionID to the end of the API URL (however you visualize the data best)

Let me know if you have any other questions!

That's definitely do-able. I think creating an analytics dashboard is probably the best way to accomplish this (mostly for the ability to export the report as a CSV).

The way I set this up on my test instance was setting the Data Source to 'QNA' and Group By to 'Post Title.'

That should give you a very general breakdown of all posts happening on your site.

For the filters, I set these two:

Type NOT EQUAL to answer_accepted

and

First Comment? EQUAL to true

The first filter should show us all posts that don't have a status of 'Accepted Answer.' The second filter is optional, but including it will filter out questions that don't have any comments/answers at all yet. What we're left with (because we're using the QnA data source) are questions that do not have an accepted status yet and have at least one comment.

Edit (Dec 18, 6pm) - Going to leave my mistake up there for the history. The better way to get this information is with an API call:

See data in browser:
/api/v2/discussions?dateInserted=&type=question&status=answered&hasComments=true

Download CSV of Data:
/api/v2/discussions.csv?dateInserted=&type=question&status=answered&hasComments=true

That's going to pull a list of all discussions that have a status of 'Answered' - meaning they have a comment but no comment has been marked as the 'best answer' yet.

Let us know if that works for you!

Great point. When you look at your own community all the time, you forget that other visitors don't see it the way you do.

Also would love to hear how others are using this!