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Custom Table Help - Discussion Posts w/ No Comments

KMoosman

I created a custom table with the aim of finding all discussion posts without a comment. No matter how I configure this table, it still returns some posts that do, in fact, have comments (despite saying the comment count is 0). What am I doing wrong?

For instance, this discussion post appears in the report - it says it has 0 comments but actually has 3. I've tried to configure the table data, metrics, limit, and filters several different ways and it continues to return a list that is inaccurate. Most do not have comments but there are several that do.

Any help or insight is greatly appreciated!

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Comments

Heather Wendt

Hi @KMoosman! I believe the issue is that Vanilla analytics will return data for Q&A style discussions without an answer, but not for general categories. However, the good news is that there is a newer feature in our filter update that can be applied to general discussions and not just Q&A. Here is a link to the discussion that walks through how to surface those particular posts.

There is an active feature request to add the ability to remove posts from admins and moderators from the results if you would like to go in and upvote it.

Hope this helps!

Genevieve P

I think the "Discussion Comment Count" is counting based on the Author, not on the comments of that discussion.

Heather Wendt

@Genevieve P that is a great distinction! Appreciate that clarification…

KMoosman

@Heather Wendt this doesn't appear to be true. The data returned seems to only include category discussion posts but does so inaccurately. On the table, the Discussion Comment Count displays as 0 but when I click into some of the returned Discussions, there are comments. With 103 returned Discussions, 88 did not have comments. So about 15% were incorrectly flagged as having 0 comments.

While I appreciate your suggestion of using the no comments filter, this option doesn't work for our needs - it isn't reportable (or sortable) and must also be done for each category individually (rather than all categories at once).

KMoosman

@Genevieve P I also thought that could have been the reason but there are authors appearing on the list that have both left comments on other posts and received comments on their posts :(

Genevieve P

Yep, I see that as well, now. I don't believe there's a good solution for creating a list like this in the back-end, I gave up a while ago. If you find anything different I'd really appreciate seeing it!

I know the solution suggested is to use the Filters on the Discussion List in the public forum, but our site isn't on Layout Editor yet so we can't leverage that feature.

A chart like this would be super helpful.

Genevieve P

Oh - @KMoosman

You can filter all categories at once by using the Recent Discussions list (the all-up discussions page) if that helps.

Shauna

Hey @KMoosman - couple of thoughts here

View of list of discussions that have no comments right this minute

You could look at your recent discussions page filtered to 'no comments' - not reportable, but it is sortable and great for finding posts that need follow up or a little love:

I'm not sure if this is a page that you use prominently in your community, so you may want to consider adding it to your navigation, you can always go there by adding /discussions to the end of your main community URL.

Automate escalating a post that has no comments after a certain period of time

This isn't in your original request, but often when community managers want a list of posts with no comments, it's so that they can do a thing with those posts - if that's the case here, automation rules might be a good choice. For example, in this community any posts that don't get a comment after a day I have it set to automatically escalate and assign to me to review:

Lastly, analytics ….

Analytics are useful for understanding how a posts data changes over time. This can make finding things like 'posts with no comments' more difficult, because we are typically looking at analytics over the course of a certain time period (let's say a month) and during that month a post might not have comments, then gain comments.

With the /discussions filter above, you're looking at it at a precise moment, not over the course of a longer time period, and with the automation rule it's checking to see if a post still doesn't have posts after a set time period, so it's less fluid.

During a month, a post might have a different number of comments throughout the month, consider this chart:

In green, we can see how many new comments a certain post got within whatever time period the analytics are set to.

In pink, we can see what those new comments brought the total # of comments to on those posts (it's not actually the total comment count of the author, I authored the Zapier one as well as the automation rules for badges ones and those values are very different)

I want to point your attention to the part in orange though - this is a thread that we use to alert our users when there is a new release on Vanilla, so that usually gets a couple of comments a month and has been around since 2019.

So it appears 3 times in this chart, since during that time period it got 1 new comment and that brought the total to 130, then it got another new comment which brought the total to 131, etc etc. This is because we are asking the analytics to show us the discussion comment count on every discussion, and that particular discussion had several entries, because at different points in time during the set time frame, that analytics query had different results.

Analytics works with points in time over an interval, so it would show that throughout a month a certain post had no comments, then one comment, then two comments, then three comments, etc etc. It's not meant to pull a list of 'right this minute' values, that's what the /discussions page and API are for.

So analytics is valuable to understand that 'journey' and timeframes between states, but it's not so great at pulling a list of things that are happening right now.

Ok, so what?! I just want to know what posts had no comments within my time period!

The thing is, all posts in the community would have no comments at a certain point.

Posts are created with no comments, and even if it's 1 second later, comments come after the post is created. So if we made a chart of posts that had no comments at a certain point in time it would simply be all posts created within that time frame, which I don't think is what you are looking for.

What do we really want to understand?

I think (and I really want to hear what you all think here as well!!!) that the real question might be:

how many posts remained 'uncommented' for a certain period of time within a certain month
what was the average length of time before a post received a comment
OR, how many posts have no comments at this very moment (and how long has it been? if a post was posted 1 or 2 minutes ago, do we want to include that in our metrics? What's reasonable?

TL;DR

Does that make sense? This kind of ended up being a novel, so the TLDR here is:

all posts are 'uncommented' at some point
to find a meaningful data point, we need to consider how long is reasonable for a post to go 'uncommented'

Excited to hear what you all think - this is a fun conversation!

Genevieve P

Woah
Amazing post, thank you Shauna!

This is what we want to know:

At this very moment, what Discussion type Posts have No Comments in XXX Categories

For our Community, this is because we have 6 Support categories where users keep asking their Questions as Discussions, so they don't appear in the Unanswered Question list. We need a quick-and-easy way to find all Discussion type of posts without comments at this current time so we can swap them over to be Q&A posts.

If we were on Layout Editor we would use the Discussion List Filter and that would work for us 🙂

fsmeier

Heyhey,
so I am currently looking into

what was the average length of time before a post received a comment

but

how many posts remained 'uncommented' for a certain period of time within a certain month

would be also interesting…

I guess there is no simple solution yet? :D

All the best,

Florian

fsmeier

So I just saw that the discussions API endpoint has the property dateLastComment but no dateFirstComment - that would be the gamechanger here i think!

All the best,

Florian

fsmeier

Added an idea:

https://success.vanillaforums.com/discussion/3224/api-add-datefirstcomment-to-discussions-endpoint

Kirstie Macfarlane

Thanks for adding that idea @fsmeierspryker - you're correct that this option doesn't exist yet so this is a feature request!

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