Do you want to have monthly reports on trends in your community? Easy peasy! Just enter the URL of your community and we will automatically collect over 70 metrics and build over a dozen reports for you!
Here are some simple steps you need to take to do this.
Create an account on app.practical-cm.com and activate your free trial subscription
- Go to app.practical-cm.com and click “signup” or “create an account”.
- After authorization, click on the round image with your initials in the upper right corner. Select the “Subscriptions” section.
- Click ‘Edit subscription’ and then, on the next window, click “Select plan” on the monthly plan card.
After that, you should have a free trial period for a week activated (no credit card required).
Add your community for analysis
- Log in to the app if you are logged out.
- Select the “My Communities” section in the panel on the left
- Then click on “Add a new community”
- Fill in the required fields in the form and click “save”
Here are the required fields:
- The URL of the site where your community is hosted. Use the full URL. Don’t forget to include https:// or http:// before the domain name. If your community is running on a subdomain, include it as well. For example, if you use a subdomain called “discourse” and your domain is “my-community.com”, your url should be “https://discourse.my-community.com/”.
- The name of a community. The name can be anything you want, but it should be clear to you what community you refer to by the name. The name will appear in all your reports. By default, we will fill this field with the domain name, but you can change it as you wish.
There are also additional options.
- API key and Username. Our engine can collect data without API key and Username if your website is publicly accessible. If your website is private, accessible only with an account or you want to speed up the collection of data from your website, please specify the API key and Username. Instructions on how to get them are available on Meta Discourse.
- Platform type. At the moment we only support Discourse, but in the near future we will add Vanilla Forums and others. If you have any requests for adding a new platform, please send me an email
You can also mark your community as “active” right away. An active community is one for which we will display reports and metrics in the rest of the app. Yes, that’s right, this means you can add more than one community to a single account. If you only have one community, we will automatically set it as active.
After you click “save”, we will start collecting data and calculating metrics. This can take from a few minutes to several dozen hours. It all depends on the size of your community, its settings, and whether you specified the API key and Username (with an API key, the collection will be faster).
View reports, explore your community metrics, compare to benchmarks
That is it! After you add the url and name of your community to the system, we will start collecting data and calculating metrics for your community automatically. You don’t need to do anything else. As soon as the reports and metrics for your community are ready to view, we will send you an email!
In the future, we will download data from your community incrementally several times each month. On the first date of a month, we will automatically recalculate all metrics and update the reports based on the new data and notify you about it.
Interested to know more about metrics and reports?
Find out more about how metrics and reports are structured in separate articles: